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IMPRESSIONS OF 


By GEORGE ELIOT, 


17 TO 27 VaKDEWATER 3t 




IK^^easiSeSbi^^ 


. By subscription $50 per annum. 

[ew York at second class rates— May 3, 1886 . 


Tile Seaside library. Pocket Edition, Issued Tri weekly, 
righted 1886 by George Munro— Entered at the Post Office at N< 




MUNRO'S PtJBLICATIOKS. 


The Heiress of Hilldrop; 

OR, 

THE ROMANCE OF A YOUNG GIRL. 

By CHARLOTTE M. BRAEME, 

Author of “ Dora Thomey 

Complete in Seaside Library (Pocket Edition), No. 741. 
PRINTED IN LARGE, BOLD, HANDSOME TYPE. 

PUI€«: 30 CEI^TS. 


For sale by all newsdealers, or sent to any address, postage pre- 
paid, on receipt of the price, 20 cents. Address 

GEORGE MUNRO, Munro’s Publishing House, 

P. O. Box 3751. 17 to 27 Vandewater Street, New York. 


SEASIDE LIBRARY (POCKET EDITIOK), KO. 711. 

A CARDINAL SIN. 

A NOVEL. 

BY HUGH CONWAY, 

Author of “ Called Back.” 

PRINTED IN LARGE, BOLD, HANDSOME TYPE. 


PRICE 30 CEI^TS, 


For sale by all newsdealers, or sent to any address, postage 
prepaid, on receipt of the price, 20 cents. Address 

GEORGE MUNRO, Munro’s Publishing House, 

P. O. Box 3751. 17 to 27 Vandewater Street. New York. 


THEOPHRASTUS SUCH 


By GEORGE ELIOT. 


Suspicione si quis errabifc sua, 

Et rapiet ad se, quod erit commune omnium, 

Stulte nudabifc auimi conscientiam. 

Huic excusatum me velim nihilominus: 

Neque enim notare singulos mens est mihi, 

Verum ipsam vitam et mores hominum oftendere. 

— Phcedrus. 



7 rat 

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NEW YORK: 

GEORGE MUNRO, PUBLISHER, 

t7 TO 27 Vandewater Street. 


> 




'O' 






GEORGE ELIOT’S WORKS 

CONTAINED IN THE SEASIDE LIBRARY (POCKET EDITION): 

NO. PRICE. 

3 The Mill on the Floss 20 

31 Middlemarch. First half 20 

31 Middlemarch. Second half 20 

34 Daniel Deronda. First half . . , , .20 

34 Daniel Deronda. Second half 20 

36 Adam Bede 20 

42 Romola . . 20 

693 Felix Holt, the Radical .20 

707 Silas Marner . . . . . , . . 10 

728 Janet’s Repentance .10 

762 Impressions of Theophrastus Such .... 10 


CONTENTS 


I. — Looking Inwaed. 

II. — Looking Backward. 

III. — How We Encourage Research. 

IV. — A Man Surprised at His Originality. 

V.— A Too Deferential Man. 

VI. — Only Temper. 

VH. — A Political Molecule. 

VIH. — The Watch-dog op Knowledge. " 

IX. — A Half-breed. 

X. — Debasing the Moral Currency. 

XI. — The Wasp Credited with the Honey-comb. 
XIL— ‘‘So Young!” 

XHI. — How We Come to Give Ourselves False 
Testimonials, and Believe in Them. 

XIV. — The Too Ready Writer. 

XV. — Diseases op Small Authorship. 

XVI. — Moral Swindlers. 

XVH. — Shadows op the Coming Race. 

XVIII. — The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep! 


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Impressions of Theophrastus Such. 


I. 

LOOKIKG IKWAKD. 

It is my habit to give an account to myself of the char- 
acters I meet with; can I give any true account of my own? 
I am a bachelor, without domestic distractions of any sort, 
and have all my life been an attentive companion to my- 
self, flattering my nature agreeably on plausible occasions, 
reviling it rather bitterly when it mortified me, and in gen- 
eral remembering its doings and sufferings with a tenacity 
which is too apt to raise surprise, if not disgust, at the care- 
less inaccuracy of my acquaintances, who impute to me 
opinions I never held, express their desire to convert me to 
my favorite ideas, forget whether I have ever been to the 
East, and are capable of being three several times aston- 
ished at my never having told them before of my accident 
in the Alps, causing me the nervous shock which has ever 
since notably diminished my digestive powers. Surely I ought 
to know myself better than these indifferent outsiders can 
know me; nay, better even than my intimate friends, to 
whom I have never breathed those items of my inward ex- 
perience which have chiefly shaped my life. 

Yet I have often been forced into the reflection that even 
the acquaintances who are as forgetful of my biography and 
tenets as they would be if I were a dead philosopher, are 
probably aware of certain points in me which may not be 
included in my most active suspicion. We sing an exqui- 
site passage out of tune, and innocently repeat it for the 
greater pleasure of our hearers. Who can be aware of what 
his foreign accent is in the ears of a native? And how can 
a man be conscious of that dull perce’ption which causes 
him to mistake altogether what will make him agreeable to 
a particular woman, and to persevere eagerly in a behavior 
which she is privately recording against him? I have had 
some confidences from my female friends as to their oj^inion 


8 IMPRESSIOT^S OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

of other men whom I have observed trying to make them- 
selves amiable, and it has occurred to me that though I can 
hardly be so blundering as Lippus and the rest of those 
mistaken candidates for favor whom I have seen ruining 
their chance by a too elaborate personal canvass, I must 
still come under the common fatality of mankind, and 
share the liability to be absurd without knowing that I am 
absurd. It is in the nature of foolish reasoning to seem 
good to the foolish reasoner. Hence, with all possible study 
of myself, with all possible effort to escape from the pitiable 
illusion which makes men laugh, shriek, or curl the lip at 
Folly^s likeness, in total unconsciousness that it resembles 
themselves, I am obliged to recognize that while there are 
secrets in me unguessed by others, these others have certain 
items of knowledge about the extent of my powers and the 
figure I make with them, which in turn are secrets ini- 
guessed by me. When I was a lad I danced a hornpipe 
with arduous scrupulosity, and while suffering pangs of 
pallid shyness was yet proud of my superiority as a dancing 
pupil, imagining for myself a high place in the estimation 
of beholders; but I can now picture the amusement they had 
in the incongruity of my solemn face and ridiculous legs. 
What sort of hornpipe am I dancing now? 

Thus, if I laugh at you, 0 fellow -men! if I trace 
with curious interest your labyrinthine self-delusions, note 
the inconsistencies in your zealous adhesions, and smile at 
your helpless endeavors in a rashly chosen part, it is not 
that I feel myself aloof from you: the more intimately I 
seem to discern your weaknesses, the stronger to me is the 
proof that I share them. How otherwise could I get tlie 
discernment? — for even what we are averse to, what we vow 
not to entertain, must have shaped or shadowed itself with- 
in us as a possibility before we can think of exorcising it. 
No man can know his brother simply as a spectator. Dear 
blunderers^ I am one of you. I wince at the fact, but I am 
not ignorant of it, that I too am laughable on unsuspected 
occasions; nay, in the very tempest and whirlwind of my 
anger, I include myself under my own indignation. If the 
human race has a bad reputation, I perceive that I can not 
escape being compromised. And thus, while I carry in 
myself the key to other menu’s experience, it is only by 
observing others that I can so far correct my self-ignorance 
as to arrive at the certainty that I am liable to commit my- 


IMPRESSIOKS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


9 


self unawares^ and to manifest some incompetency which I 
know no more of than the blind man knows of his image 
in the glass. 

Is it, then, possible to describe one^s self at once faith- 
fully and fully? In all autobiography there is, nay, ought 
to be, an incompleteness which may have the effect of falsi- 
ty. We are each of us bound to reticence by the piety we 
owe to those who have been nearest to us and have had a 
mingled influence over our lives; by the fellow-feeling 
which should restrain us from turning our volunteered and 
picked confessions into an act of accusation against others, 
who have no chance of vindicating themselves; and most of 
all by that reverence for the higher efforts of our common 
nature, which commands us to bury its lowest fatalities, its 
invincible remnants of the brute, its most agonizing 
struggles with temptation, in unbroken silence. But the 
incompleteness which comes of self -ignorance may be com- 
pensated by self-betrayal. A man who is affected to tears 
in dwelling on the generosity of his own sentiments makes 
me aware of several things not included under those terms. 
Who has sinned more against those three duteous reticences 
than Jean Jacques? Yet half our impressions of his 
character come not from what he means to convey, but 
from what he unconsciously enables us to discern. 

This naive veracity of self -presentation is attainable by 
the slenderest talent on the most trivial occasions. The 
least lucid and impressive of orators may be perfectly suc- 
cessful in showing us the weak points of his grammar. 
Hence I too may be so far like Jean .Tacques as to com- 
municate more than I am aware of. I am not, indeed, 
writing an autobiography, or pretending to give an unre- 
served description of myself, but only off'ering some slight 
confessions in an apologetic light, to indicate that if, in my 
absence, you dealt as freely with my unconscious weaknesses 
as I have dealt with the unconscious weaknesses of others, 
I should not feel myself warranted by common sense in re- 
garding your freedom of observation as an exceptional case 
of evil-speaking, or as malignant interpretation of a char- 
acter which really offers no handle to just objection; or 
even as an unfair use, for your amusement, of disadvan- 
tages which, since they are mine, should be regarded with 
more than ordinary tenderness. Let me, at least, try to 
feel myself in the ranks with my fellow-men. It is true 


10 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


that I would rather not hear either your Avell-fouiided ridi- 
cule or your judicious strictures. Though not averse to 
finding fault with myself, and conscious of deserving lashes. 
I like to keep the scourge in my own discriminating hand. 
I never felt myself sufficiently meritorious to lik^e being 
hated as a proof of my superiority, or so thirsty for im- 
provement as to desire that all my acquaintances should 
give me their candid opinion of me. I really do not want 
to learn from my enemies: I prefer having none to learn 
from. Instead of being glad when men use me desj)itef ully, 
I wish they would behave better, and find a more amiable 
occupation for their intervals of business. In brief, after a 
close intimacy with myself for a longer period than I choose 
to mention, I find within me a permanent longing for ap- 
probation, sympathy, and love. 

Yet I am a bachelor, and the person I love best has never 
loved me, or known that I loved her. Though continually 
in society, and caring about the joys and sorrows of my 
neighbors, I feel myself, so far as my personal lot is con- 
cerned, uncared for and alone. ^^Your own fault, my 
dear fellow said Minutius Felix one day that I had incau- 
tiously mentioned this uninteresting fact. And he was 
right — in senses other than he intended. Why should I 
expect to be admired, and have my company doted on? I 
have done no services to my country beyond those of every 
peaceable, orderly citizen; and as to intellectual contrib.M- 
tion, my only published work was a failure, so that I am 
spoken of to inquiring beholders as the author of a book 
you have probably not seen.""^ (The work was a humorous 
romance, unique in its kind, and I am told is much tasted 
in a Cherokee translation, where the jokes are rendered 
with all the serious eloquence characteristic of the Eed 
]’aces. ) This sort of distinction, as a writer nobody is like- 
ly to have read, can hardly counteract an indistinctness in 
my articulation, which the best-intentioned loudness will 
not reined^ Then, in some quarters my awkward feet are 
against me, the length of my upper lip, and an inveterate 
way I have of walking with my head foremost and my chin 
projecting. One can become only too well aware of such 
things by looking in the glass, or in that other mirror held 
up to nature in the frank opinions of street boys, or of our 
Free People traveling by excursion-train; and no doubt they 
account for the half-suppressed smik which I have observed 


IMPRESSIONS OE THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


11 


on some fair faces when I have first been presented before 
them. This direct perceptive judgment is not to be argued 
against. But I am tempted to remonstrate when the phys- 
ical points I have mentioned are apparently taken to war- 
rant unfavorable inferences concerning my mental quick- 
ness. With all the increasing uncertainty which modern 
progress has thrown over the relations of mind and body, 
it seems tolerably clear that wit can not be seated in the 
upper lip, and that the balance of the haunches in walk- 
ing has nothing to do with the subtle discrimination of 
ideas. Yet strangers evidently do not expect me to make 
a clever observation, and my good things are as unnoticed 
as if they were anonymous pictures. *I have indeed had 
the mixed satisfaction of finding that when they were ap- 
propriated by some one else they were found remarkable, 
and even brilliant. It is to be borne in mind that I am 
not rich, have neither stud nor cellar, and no very high con- 
nections such as to give to a look of imbecility a certain 
prestige of inheritance through a titled line; just as ^^the 
Austrian lip confers a grandeur of historical associations 
on a kind of stature which might make us reject an adver- 
tising footman. I have now and then done harm to a good 
cause by speaking for it in public, and have discovered too 
late that my attitude on the occasion would more suitably 
have been that of negative beneficence. Is it really 
to the advantage of an opinion that I should be known to 
hold it? And as to the force of my arguments, that is a 
secondary consideration with audiences who have given a 
new scope to the ex 'pede Herculem principle, and from 
awkward feet infer awkward fallacies. Once, when zeal 
lifted me on my legs, I distinctly heard an enlightened ar- 
tisan remark, Kerens a rum cut P and doubtless he rea- 
soned in the same way as the elegant Glycera when she po- 
litely puts on an air of listening to me, but elevates her 
eyebrows and chills her glance in sign of predetermined 
neutrality; both have their reasons for judging the quality 
of my speech beforehand. 

This sort of reception to a man of affectionate disposition, 
who has also the innocent vanity of desiring to be agree- 
able, has naturally a depressing if not imbittering tendency; 
and in early life I began to seek for some consoling point 
of view, some warrantable method of softening the hard 
pease I had to walk on, some comfortable fanaticism which 


12 IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

might supply the needed self-satisfaction. At one time I 
dwelt much on the idea of compensation; trying to believe 
that I was all the wiser for my bruised vanity, that 1 had 
the higher place in the true spiritual scale, and even that a 
day might come when some visible triumph would place me 
in the French heaven of having the laughers on my side. 
But I presently perceived that this was a very odious sort 
of self -cajolery. Was it in the least true that I was wiser 
than several of my friends who made an excellent figure, 
and were perhaps praised a little beyond their merit? Is the 
ugly unready man in the corner, outside the current of con- 
versation, really likely to have a fairer view of things than 
the agreeable talker, whose success strikes the unsuccessful 
as a repulsive example of forwardness and conceit? And 
as to compensation in future years, would the fact that I 
myself got it reconcile me to an order of things in which I 
could see a multitude with as bad a share as mine, who, in- 
stead of getting their corresponding compensation, were 
getting beyond the reach of it in old age? What could be 
more contemptible than the mood of mind which makes a 
man measure the justice of divine or human law by the 
agreeableness of his own shadow and the ample satisfaction 
of his own desires? 

I dropped a form of consolation which seemed to be en- 
couraging me in the persuasion that my discontent. was the 
chief evil in the world, and my benefit the soul of good in 
that evil. May there not be at least a partial release from 
the imprisoning verdict that a man^s philosophy is the 
formula of his personality? In certain branches of science 
we can ascertain our personal equation, the measure of 
difference between our own judgments and an average 
standard: may there not be some corresponding correction 
of our personal partialities in mor^l theorizing? If asquint 
or other ocular defect disturbs my vision, I can get in- 
structed4n the fact, be made aware that my condition is 
abnormal, aiid either through spectacles or diligent imagi- 
nation I can learn the average appearance of things: is 
there no remedy or corrective for that inward squint which 
consists of a dissatisfied egoism or other want of mental 
balance? In my conscience I saw that the bias of personal 
discontent was just as misleading and odious as the bias of 
self-satisfaction. Whether we look through the rose-colored 
glass or the indigo, we are equally far from the lines which 


IMPEESSTONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


13 


the healthy human eye beholds in heaven above and earth 
below. I began to dread ways of consoling which were 
really a flattering of native illusions, a feeding-up into 
monstrosity of an inward growth already disproportionate; 
to get an especial scorn for that scorn of mankind which is 
a transmuted disappointment of preposterous claims; to 
watch with peculiar alarm lest what I called my philosophic 
estimate of the human lot in general, should be a mere 
prose lyric expressing my own pain and consequent bad 
temper. The standing-ground worth striving after seemed 
to be some Delectable Mountain, whence I could see things 
in proportions as little as possible determined by that self- 
partiality which certainly plays a necessary part in our 
bodily sustenance, but has a starving effect on the 
mind. 

Thus I finally gave up any attempt to make out that I 
preferred cutting a bad figure, and that I liked to be 
despised, because in this way I was getting more virtuous 
than my successful rivals; and I have long looked with sus- 
picion on all views which are recommended as peculiarly 
consolatory to wounded vanity or other personal disappoint- 
ment. The consolations of egoism are simply a change of 
attitude or a resort to a new kind of diet which soothes and 
fattens it. Fed in this way, it is apt to become a monstrous 
spiritual pride, or a chuckling satisfaction that the final 
balance will not be against us, but against those who now 
eclipse us. Examining the world in order to find con- 
solation is very much like looking carefully over the pages 
of a great book in order to find our own name, if not in the 
text, at least in a laudatory note : whether we find what we 
want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true 
knowledge of the contents. But an attention fixed o]i the 
main theme or various matter of the book would deliver us 
from that slavish subjection to our own self-importance. 
And I had the mighty volume of the world before me. 
Nay, I had the struggling action of a myriad lives around 
me, each single life as dear to itself as mine to me. Was 
there no escape here from this stupidity of a murmuring 
self-occupation? Clearly enough, if anything hindered my 
thought from rising to the force of passionately interested 
contemplation, or my poor pent-up pond of sensitiveness 
from widening into a beneficent river of sympathy, it was 
my own dullness; and though I could not make myself the 


14 


IMPEESSIONS OF THFOPHEASTrS SrCH. 


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cheerfulness as to their chfince! of sute'sT™"- 

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4“:ga?|‘5Ss=iS 


IMPKESSIOKS OF THEOPHllASTUS SUCH. 15 

ciitor warned me that I was acting on that dangerous 
.isreading, Do as you are done by.'^^ Eecalling the true 
irsion of the golden rule, I could not wish that others 
lould lower my spirits as 1 was lowering my friend^s. 
After several times obtaining the same result from a. like 
experiment, in which all the circumstances were varied ex- 
cept my own personality, I took it as an established infer- 
ence that these fitful signs of a lingering belief in my own 
importance were generally felt to be abnormal, and were 
something short of that sanity which I aimed to secure. 
Clearness on this point is not without its gratifications, as 
I have said. While my desire to explain myself in private 
ears has been quelled, the habit of getting interested in the 
experience of others has been continually gathering strength, 
and I am really at the point of finding that this world would 
be worth living in without any lot of one^s own. Is it not 
possible for me to enjoy the scenery of the earth without 
saying to myself, I have a cabbage-garden in it But 
this sounds like the lunacy of fancying one^s self everybody 
else, and being unable to play one^s own part decently — 
another form of the disloyal attempt to be independent of 
the common lot, and to live without a sharing of pain. 

Perhaps I have made self-betrayals enough already to show 
that I have not arrived at that non-human independence. 
My conversational reticences about myself turn into garru- 
lousness on paper — as the sea-lion plunges and swims the 
more energetically because his limbs are of a sort to make 
him shambling on land. The act of writing, in spite of 
past experience, brings with it the vague, delightful illusion 
of an audience nearer to my idiom than the Cherokees, and 
more numerous than the visionary One for whom many 
authors have declared themselves willing to go through the 
pleasing punishment of publication. My illusion is of a 
more liberal kind, and I imagine a far-off, hazy, multitu- 
dinous assemblage, as in a picture of Paradise, making an 
approving chorus to the sentences and paragraphs of which I 
myself particularly enjoy the writing. The haze is a neces- 
sary condition. If any physiognomy becomes distinct in the 
foreground, it is fatal. The countenance is sure to be one 
bent on discountenancing my innocent intentions: it is pale- 
eyed, incapable of being amused when I am amused or in- 
dignant at what makes me indignant; it stares at my pre- 
sumption, pities my ignorance, ""or is manifestly preparing 


16 


IMPEESSIOKS OF THEOPHIUSTUS SUCH. 


to expose the various instances in which I unconsciously 
disgrace myself. I shudder at this too corporeal auditor, 
and turn toward another point of the compass where the 
haze is unbroken. Why should I not indulge this remain- 
ing illusion, since I do not take my approving choral para- 
dise as a warrant for setting the press to work again and 
making some thousand sheets of superior paper unsalable? 
I leave my manuscripts to a judgment outside my imagina- 
tion, but I will not ask to hear it, or request my friend to 
pronounce, before I have been buried decently, what he 
really thinks of my parts, and to state candidly whether my 
papers would be most usefully applied in lighting the cheer- 
ful domestic fire. It is too probable that he will be exas- 
perated at the trouble I have given him of reading them; 
but the consequent clearness and vivacity with which he 
could demonstrate to me that the fault of my manuscripts, 
as of my one published work, is simply flatness, and not 
that surpassing subtility which is the preferable ground of 
popular neglect — this verdict, however instructively ex- 
pressed, is a portion of earthly discipline of which I will not 
beseech my friend to be the instrument. Other persons, I 
am aware, have not the same cowardly shrinking from a 
candid opinion of their performances, and are even im- 
portunately eager for it; but I have convinced myself in 
numerous cases that such exposers of their own back to the 
sniiter were of too hopeful a disposition to believe in the 
scourge, and really trusted in a pleasant annointing, an 
outpouring of balm without any previous wounds. I am of 
a less trusting disposition, and will only ask my friend to 
use his judgment in insuring me against posthumous 
mistake. 

Thus I make myself a charter to write, and keep the 
pleasing, inspiring illusion of being listened to, though I 
may sometimes write about myself. What I have already 
said on ^s too familiar theme has been meant only as a 
preface, to show that in noting the weaknesses of my ac- 
quaintances I am conscious of my fellowship with them. 
That a gratified sense of superiority is at the root of bar- 
barous laughter may be at least half the truth. But there 
is a loving laughter in which the only recognized superiority 
is that of the ideal self, the God within, holding the mirror 
and the scourge for our own pettiness as well as our 
neighbors^ 


* IMPRESSIOJ^S OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. . 17 


IL 


LOOKING BACKWARD. 

Most of us wlio have had decent parents would shrink 
from wishing that our father and mother had been some- 
body else whom we never knew; yet it is held no impiety — 
rather, a graceful mark of instruction — for a man to wail 
that he was not the son of another age and another nation, 
of which also he knows nothing except through the easy 
process of an imperf^t imagination and a flattering fancy. 

But the period thus looked back on with a purely admir- 
ing regret, as perfect enough to suit a superior mind, is al- 
ways a long way ofl; the desirable contemporaries are hardly 
nearer than Leonardo da Vinci, most likely they are the 
fellow-citizens of Pericles, or, best of all, of the jEolic 
lyrists whose sparse remains suggest a comfortable contrast 
with our redundance. No impassioned personage wishes 
he had been born in the age of Pitt, that his ardent youth 
might have eaten the dearest bread, dressed itself with the 
longest coat-tails and the shortest waist, or heard the loud- 
est grumbling at the heWiest war-taxes; and it would be 
really something original in polished verse if one of our 
young writers declared he would gladly be turned eighty- 
flve that -he might have known the joy and pride of being 
an Englishman when there were fewer reforms and plenty 
of highwaymen, fewer discoveries and more faces pitted 
with the small-pox, when laws were made to keep up the 
price of corn, and the troublesome Irish were more miser- 
able. Three-quarters of a century ago is not a distance 
that lends much enchantment to the view. We are familiar 
with the average men of that period, and are still con- 
sciously encumbered with its bad contrivances and mistaken 
acts. The lords and gentlemen painted by young Lawrence 
talked and wrote their nonsense- in a tongue we thoroughly 
understand ; Hence their times are not much flattered, not 
much glorifled by the yearnings of that modern sect of 
Flagellants who make a ritual of lashing — not themselves, 
but all their neighbors. To me, however, that paternal 
time, the time of my father^s youth, never seemed prosaic, 
for it came to my imagination first through his memories, 
which made a wondrous perspective to my little daily world 


18 IMPRESSIOi^S OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. ‘ 

of discovery. Aiid^ for my part, I can call no age abso- 
lutely nnpoetic: how should it be so, since there are always 
children to whom the acorns and the swallow ^s eggs are a 
wonder, always those human passions and fatalities through 
which Garrick as Hamlet in bob-wig and knee-breeches 
moved his audience more than some have since done in 
velvet tunic and plume? But every age since the golden 
may be made more or less prosaic by minds that attend 
only to its vulgar and sordid elements, of which there was 
always an abundance even in Greece and Italy, the favorite 
realms of the retrospective optimists. To be quite fair to- 
ward the ages, a little ugliness as well as beauty must be 
allowed to each of them, a little implicit poetry even to 
those Avhich echoed loudest with servile, pompous, and 
trivial prose. 

Such impartiality is not in vogue at present. If we ac- 
knowledge our obligation to the ancients, it is hardly to be 
done without some flouting of our contemporaries, who, 
with all their faults, must be allowed the merit of keeping 
the world habitable for the reflned eulogists of the blame- 
less past. One wonders whether the remarkable origina- 
tors who first had the notion of digging wells, or of churn- 
ing for butter, and who were cerfainly very useful to their 
own time as well as ours, were left quite free from invidi- 
ous comparison with predecessors who let the water and 
the milk alone, or whether some rhetorical nomad, as lie 
stretched himself on the grass with a good appetite for con- 
temporary butter, became loud on the virtue of ancestors 
who were uncorrupted by the produce of the cow; nay, 
whether in a high flight of imaginative self-sacriflce (after 
swallowing the butter) he even wished himself earlier born 
and already eaten for the sustenance of a generation more 
naive than his own. 

I have often had the fooTs hectic of wishing about the 
unalterable, but with me that useless exercise has turned 
chiefly on the conception of a different self, and not, as it 
usually does in literature, on the advantage of having been 
born in a different age, and more especially in one where 
life is imagined to have been altogether majestic and grace- 
ful. With my present abilities, external proportions, and 
generally small provision for ecstatic enjoyment, where is 
the ground for confidence that I should have had a prefer- 
able career in such an epoch of society? An age in which 


imprt:ssioks op thpophrastus such. 


19 


every department has its awkward squad seems in my 
mind^s eye to suit me better. I might have wandered by 
the Strymon under Philip and Alexander without throwing 
any new light on method or organizing the sum of human 
knowledge; on the other hand I might have objected to 
Aristotle as too much of a systematizer^ and have preferred 
the freedom of a little self-contradiction as offering more 
chances of truth. I gather^ too, from the undeniable tes- 
timony of his disciple Theo]3hrastus that there were bores, 
ill-bred persons, and detractors even in Athens, of species 
remarkably corresponding to the English, and not yet 
made endurable by being classic; and altogether, with my 
present fastidious nostril, I feel that I am the better off for 
possessing Athenian life solely as an inodorous fragment of 
antiquity. As to Sappho^s Mitylene, while I am convinced 
that the Lesbian capital held some plain men of middle 
stature and slow conversational powers, the addition of my- 
self to their number, though clad in the majestic folds of 
the himation and without cravat, would hardly have made 
a sensation among the accomplished fair ones who were so 
precise in adjusting their own drapery about their delicate 
ankles; whereas, by being another sort of person in the pres- 
ent age, I might have given it some needful theoretic 
clew; or I might have poured fo)^rth poetic strains which 
have anticipated theory, and seemed a voice from the 
prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming of things to 
come;^^ or I might have been one of, those benignant lovely 
souls who, without astonishing the public and posterity, 
make a happy difference in the lives close around them, 
and in this way lift the average of earthly joy; in some 
form or other I might have been so filled from the store of 
universal existence that I should have been freed from that 
empty wishing which is like a chikEs cry to be inside a gol- 
den cloud, its imagination being too ignorant to figure the 
lining of dimness and damp. 

On the whole, though there is some rash boasting about 
enlightenment, and an occasional insistance on an origin- 
ality which is that of the present yearns, corn crop, we seem 
too much disposed to indulge, and to call by compliment- 
ary names, a greater charity for other portions of the hu- 
man race than for our contemporaries. All reverence and 
gratitude for the worthy Dead on whose labors we have 
entered, all care for the future generations whose lot we are 


20 


IMPRESSIOKS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


23reparing; but some affection and fairness for those who 
are doing the actual work of the worlds, some attempt to re- 
gard them with the same freedom from ill-temper, whether 
on private or public grounds, as we may hope will be felt 
by those who will call us ancient! Otherwise, the looking 
before and after, which is our grand human privilege, is in 
danger of turning to a sort of other-worldliness, breeding a 
more illogical indifference or bitterness than was ever bred 
by the ascetic^s contemplation of heaven. Except on the 
ground of a primitive golden age and continuous degener- 
acy, I see no rational footing for scorning the whole pres- 
ent population of the globe, unless 1 scorn every previous 
generation from Avhom they have inherited their diseases of 
mind and body, and by consequence scorn my own scorn, 
which is equally an inheritance of mixed ideas and feelings 
concocted for me in the boiling caldron of this universally 
contemptible life, and so on — scorning to infinity. This 
may represent some actual states of minds, for it is a narrow 
prejudice of mathematicians to suppose that ways of think- 
ing are to be driven out of the field by being reduced to an 
absurdity. The Absurd is taken as an excellent juicy thistle 
by many constitutions. 

Eefiections of this sort have gradually determined me not 
to grumble at the age in which I happen to have been born 
— a natural tendency certainly older than Hesiod. Many 
ancient beautiful things are lost, many ugly modern things 
have arisen; but invert the proposition, and it is equally 
true. I at least am a modern with some interest in advo- 
cating tolerance; and notwithstanding an inborn beguile- 
ment which carries my affection and regret continually into 
an imagined past, I am aware that I must lose all sense of 
moral proj3ortion unless I keep alive a stronger attachmeiit 
to what is near, and a power of admiring what I best know 
and understand. Hence this question of wishing to be rid 
of onie^ contemporaries associates itself with my filial feel- 
ing, and calls up the thought that I might as justifiably 
wish that I had had other parents than those whose loving 
tones are my earliest memory, and whose last parting first 
taught me the meaning of death. I feel bound to quell 
such a wish as blasphemy. 

Besides, there are other reasons why I am contented that 
my father was a country parson, born much about the same 
time as Scott and Wordsworth; notwithstanding certain 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


21 


qualms I have felt at the fact that the property on which I 
am living was saved out Of titlie before the period of com- 
mutation, and without the provisional transfiguration into 
a modus. It has sometimes occurred to me when I have 
been taking a slice of excellent ham that, from a too tena- 
ble point of view, I was breakfasting on a small squealing 
black pig which, more than half a century ago, was the 
unwilling representative of spiritual advantages not other- 
wise acknowledged by the grudging farmer or dairyman 
who parted with him. One enters on a fearful labyrinth in 
tracing compound interest backward,, and such complica- 
tions of thought have reduced the flavor of the ham; but 
since I have nevertheless eaten it, the chief effect has been 
to moderate the severity of my radicalism (which was not 
part of my paternal inheritance) and to raise the assuaging 
refleetion, that if the pig and the parishioner had been in- 
telligent enough to anticipate my historical point of view, 
they would have seen themselves and the rector in a light 
that would have made tithe voluntary. Notwithstanding 
such drawbacks, I am rather fond of the mental furniture 
I got by having a father who was well acquainted with all 
ranks of his neighbors, and am thankful that he was not 
one of those aristocratic clergymen who could not have sat 
down to a meal with any family in the parish except my 
lord^s — still more, that he was not an earl or a marquis. A 
chief misfortune of high birth is that it usually shuts a man 
out from the large sympathetic kno.wledge of human expe- 
rience which comes from contact with various classes on 
their own level, and in my father^s time that entail of social 
ignorance had not been disturbed as we see it now. To 
look always from overhead at the crowd of one^s fellow- 
men must be in many ways incapacitating, even with the 
best will and intelligence. The serious blunders it must 
lead to in the effort to manage them for their good, one 
may see clearly by the mistaken ways people take of flat- 
tering and enticing those whose associations are unlike 
their own. Hence I have always thought that the most 
fortunate Britons are those whose experience has given 
them a practical share in many aspects of the national lot, 
who have lived long among the mixed commonalty, rough- 
ing it with them under difficulties, knowing how their food 
tastes to them, and getting acquainted with their notions 
and motives, not by inference from traditional types in 


22 


IMPRESSTOI^S OF THEOPHFASTITg SUCH. 


literature or from pliilosopliical theories, but from daily 
fellowship and observation. 

Of course such experience is apt to get antiquated, and 
my father might find himself much at a loss among a mixed 
rural population of the present day; but he knew very well 
what could be wisely expected from the miners, the weavers, 
the field-laborers, and farmers of his own time — yes, and 
from the aristocracy;^ for he had been brought up in close 
contact with them, and had been companion to a young 
nobleman who was deaf and dumb. A clergyman, lad,^"" 
he used to say to me, should feel in himself a bit of every 
class;^^ and this theory had a felicitous agreement with his 
inclination and practice, which certainly answered in mak- 
ing him beloved by his parishioners. They grumbled at 
their obligations toward him; but what then? It was nat- 
ural to grumble at any demand for payment, tithe included, 
but also natural for a rector to desire his tithe and look well 
after the levying. A Christian pastor who did not mind 
about his money was not an ideal prevalent among the 
rural minds of fat central England, and might have seemed 
to introduce a dangerous laxity of supposition about Chris- 
tian laymen who happened to be creclitors. My father was 
none the less beloved because he was understood to be of a 
saving disposition, and how could he save without getting 
his tithe? The sight of him was not unwelcome at any 
door, and he was remarkable among the clergy of his dis- 
trict for having no lOiSting feud with rich or poor in his 
13arish. I profited by his popularity; and for months after 
my mother ^s death, when I was a little fellow of nine, I 
was taken care of first at one homestead and then at an- 
other — a variety whieh I enjoyed much more than my stay 
at the Hall, where there was a tutor. Afterward, for sereral 
years, I was my father^s constant companion in his out- 
door business, riding by his side on my little pony, and 
listenih^ to the lengthy dialogues he held with Darby or 
Joan, the one on the road or in the fields, the other outside 
or inside her door. In my earliest remembrance of him his 
hair was already gray, for I was his youngest as well as his 
only surviving child; and it seemed to me that advanced 
age was approj)riate to a father, as indeed in all respects I 
coTisidered him a parent so much to my honor, that the 
mention of my relationship to him was likely to secure me 
regard among those to whom I was otherwise a stranger — 


IMPRESSIONS OE THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 23 

my father^s stories from his life including so many names 
of distant persons that my imagination placed no limit to 
his acquaintanceship. He was a pithy talker, and his ser- 
mons have marks of his own composition. It is true, they 
must have been already old when I began to listen to them, 
and they were no more than a yearns supply, so that they 
recurred as regularly as the Collects. But though this 
system has been much ridiculed, I am prepared to defend 
it as equally sound with that of a liturgy; and even if my 
researches had shown me that some of my father^’s yearly 
sermons had been copied out from the works of elder di- 
vines, this would only have been another proof of his good 
judgment. One may prefer fresh eggs though laid by a 
fowl of the meanest understanding, but why fresh ser- 
mons? 

Nor can I be sorry, though myself given to medi- 
tative if not active innovation, that my father was a Tory 
who had not exactly a dislike to innovators and Dissenters, 
but a slight opinion of them as persons of ill-founded self- 
confidence; whence my young ears gathered many details 
concerning those who might perhaps have called them- 
selves the more advanced thinkers in our nearest market- 
town, tending to convince me that their characters were 
quite as mixed as those of the thinkers behind them. This 
circumstance of my rearing has at least delivered me from 
certain mistakes of classification which I observe in many 
of my superiors, who have apparently no affectionate mem- 
ories of a goodness mingled with what they now regard as 
outworn prejudices. Indeed, my philosophical notions, 
such as they are, continually carry me back to the time 
when the fitful gleams of a spring day used to show me my 
own shadow as that of a small boy on a small pony, riding 
by the side of a larger cob-mounted shadow over the breezy 
uplands which we used to dignify with the name of hills, or 
along by-roads with broad grassy borders and hedge-rows 
reckless of utility, on our way to outlying hamlets, whose 
groups of inhabitants were as distinctive to my imagination 
as if they had belonged to different regions of the globe. 
From these we sometimes rode onward to the adjoining 
parish, where also my father officiated, for he was a plural- 
ist, but — I hasten to add — on the smallest scale; for his 
one extra living was a poor vicarage, with hardly fifty par- 
ishioners, and its church would have made a very shwby 


24 IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. ■ 

barn the ^ray worm-eaten wood of its pews and pulpit, 
with' their doors only half hanging on the hinges, being 
exactly the color of a lean mouse which I once observed 
as an interesting member pf the scant congregation, and 
coniectured to be the. identical church mouse I had heard 
referred to as an example of extreme poverty ; for I was 
a precocious boy, and often reasoned after the fashion 
of my elders, arguing that - Jack and Jill ^ were real 
personages in our parish, and that if I could identify 
- Jack I should find on him the marks of a broken 

Sometimes when I am in a crowded London drawing- 
room (for I am a town-bird now, acquainted with smoky 
eaves, and tasting Nature in the parks) quick flights of 
memory take me back among my father s panshioneis 
while I am still conscious of elbowing men who wear the 
same evening uniform as myself; and I presently begin to 
wonder what varieties of history lie hidden under this 
monotony of aspect. Some of them, perhaps, belong to 
families with many quarterings, but how many - quarter- 
ings"" of diverse contact with their fellow-countrymen 
enter into their qualifications to be parliamentary leaders, 
professors of social science, or journalistic guides of the 
popular mind? Not that I feel myself a person made com- 
petent by experience; on the contrary, I argue that since 
an observation of different ranks has still left me practicaUy 
a poor creature, what must be the condition of those who 
object even to read about the life of other British classes 
than their own? But of my elbowing neighbors in their 
crush hats I usually imagine that the most distinguished 
among them have probably had a far more instructive 
journey into manhood than mine. Here, perhaps, is 
k thought- worn physiognomy, seeming at the present 
moment to be classed as a mere species of white cravat 
and Wallow-tail, which may once, like Farad ay^s, have 
shown itself, in curiously dubious embryonic form, leaning 
against a cottage lintel in small corduroys, and hungrily 
eating a bit of brown bread and bacon; there is a pair of 
eyes, now too much wearied by the gas-light of public as- 
semblies, that once perhaps learned to read their native 
England through the same alphabet as mine not within 
the boundaries of an ancestral park, never even being 
driven through the county town five miles off, but among 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


25 


the midland villages and markets^ along by the tree-stud- 
ded hedge-rows^ and where the heavy barges seem in the 
distance to float mysteriously among the rushes and the 
feathered grass. Our vision, both real and ideal, has since 
then been fllled with far other scenes; among eternal snows 
and stupendous sun-scorched monuments of departed em- 
pires;. within the scent of the long orange-groves; and 
where the temple of Neptune looks out over the siren- 
haunted sea. But my eyes at least have kept their early 
affectionate joy in our native landscape, which is one deep 
root of our national life and language. 

And I often smile at my consciousness that certain con- 
servative prepossessions have mingled themselves for me 
with the influences of our midland scenery, from the tops 
of the elms down to the buttercups and the little way-side 
vetches. Naturally enough. That part of my fa therms 
prime to which he oftenest referred had fallen on the days 
when the great wave of political enthusiasm and belief in a 
speedy. regeneration of all things had ebbed, and the sup- 
posed millenial initiative of France was turning into a Na- 
poleonic empire, the sway of an Attila with a mouth speak- 
ing proud things in a jargon half revolutionary, half Eoman. 
Men were beginning to shrink timidly from the memory of 
their own words and from the recognition of the fellowships 
they had formed ten years before; and even reforming 
Englishmen, for the most part, were willing to wait for the 
perfection of society?', if only they could keep their throats 
perfect and help to drive away the chief enemy of mankind 
from our coasts. To my father^s mind the noisy teachers 
of revolutionary doctrine were, to speak mildly, a variable 
mixture of the fool and the scoundrel; the welfare of the 
nation lay in a strong government which could maintain 
order; and I was accustomed to hear him utter the word 
government '’Mn a tone that charged it with awe, and 
made it part of my effective religion, in contrast with the 
word rebel, which seemed to carry the stamp of evil in 
its syllables, and, lit by the fact that Satan was the first 
rebel, made an argument dispensing with more detailed in- 
quiry. I gathered that our national troubles in the first two 
decades of this century were not at all due to the mistakes 
of our administrators, and that England, with its fine 
Church and Constitution, would have been exceedingly 
well off if every British subject had been thankful for what 


26 iMPRi:ssiOKS OF Theophrastus such. 

was provided, and had minded his own business— if, for ex- 
ample, numerous Catholics of that period had been aware 
how very modest they ought to be, considering they were 
Irish. The times, I heard, had often been bad, but I was 
constantly hearing of bad times as a name for actual 
evenings and mornings when the godfathers who gave them 
that name appeared to me remarkably comfortable. Al- 
together, my father^s England seemed to me lovable, lauda- 
ble, full of good men, and having good rulers, from Mr. 
Pitt on to the Duke of Wellington, until he was for emanci- 
pating the Catholics; and it was so far from prosaic to me 
that I looked into it for a more exciting romance than such 
as I could find in my own adventures, which consisted 
mainly in fancied cries calling for the resolute wielding of 
domestic swords and fire-arms against unapparent robbers, 
rioters, and invaders who, it seemed, in my f ather^s prime, 
had more chance of being real. The morris-dancers had 
not then dwindled to a ragged and almost vanished rout 
(owing the traditional name probably to the historic fancy 
of our superannuated groom); also, the good old king was 
alive and well, which made all the more difference because 
I had no notion what he was and did— only understanding 
in general that if he had been still on the throne he would 
have hindered everything that wise persons thought unde- 
sirable. 

Certainly that elder England, with its frankly salable 
boroughs, so cheap compared with the seats obtained under 
the reformed method, and its boroughs kindly presented 
by noblemen desirous to encourage gratitude, its prisons 
with a miscellaneous company of felons and maniacs, and 
without any supply of water, its bloated, idle charities, its 
non-resident jovial clergy, its militia-balloting, and, above 
all, its blank ignorance of what we, its posterity, should be 
thinking of it, has great differences from the England of 
to-da^ Yet we discern a strong family likeness. Is there 
any country which shows at once as much stability and as 
much susceptibility to change as ours? Our national life is 
like that scenery which I early learned to love, not subject 
to great convulsions, but easily showing more or less deli- 
cate (sometimes melancholy) effects from minor changes. 
Hence our midland plains have never lost their familiar 
expression and conservative spirit for me; yet at every other 
mile, since I first looked on them, some sign of world- wide 


IMPKESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


27 


change^ some new direction of human labor, has wrought 
itself into what one may call the speech of the landscape — 
in contrast with those grander and vaster regions of the 
earth which keep an in£tferent aspect in the presence of 
men^s toil and devices. What does it signify that a lilipu- 
tian train passes over a viaduct amidst the abysses of the 
Apennines, or that a caravan laden with a nation ^s offerings 
creeps across the unresting sameness of the desert, or that 
a petty cloud of steam sweeps for an instant over the face of 
an Egyptian colossus immovably submitting to its slow 
burial beneath the sand? But our woodlands and pastures, 
our hedge-parted corn-fields and meadows, our bits of high 
common where we used to plant the wind-mills, our quiet 
little rivers here and there fit to turn a mill-wheel, our 
villages along the old coach-roads, are all easily alterable 
lineaments that seem to make the. face of our Mother-land 
sympathetic with the laborious lives of her children. She 
does not take their plows and wagons contemptuously, but 
rather makes every hovel and every sheep-fold, every 
railed-bridge or fallen tree-trunk,, an agreeably noticeable 
incident; not a mere speck in the midst *of unmeasured 
vastness, but a piece of our social history in pictorial writ- 
ing. 

Our rural tracts — where no Babel-chimney scales the 
heavens — are without mighty objects to fill the soul with 
the sense of an outer world unconquerably aloof from our 
efforts. The wastes are play-grounds (and let us try to 
keep them such for the children's children who will inherit 
no other sort of demesne); the grasses and reeds nod to 
each other over the river, but we have cut a canal close by ; 
the very heights laugh with corn in August, or lift the 
plow-team against the sky in September. Then comes a 
crowd of burly navvies with pickaxes and barrows, and 
while hardly a wrinkle is made in the fading mother^’s face 
or a new curve of health in the blooming girBs, the hills 
are cut through or the breaches between them spanned, we 
choose our level, and the white steam-pennon flies along it. 

But because our land shows this readiness to be changed, 
all signs of permanence upon it raise a tender attachment 
instead of awe; some of us, at least, love the scanty relics 
of our forests, and are thankful if a bush is left of the old 
hedge-row. A crumbling bit of wall where the delicate 
ivy-leaved toad-flax hangs its light branches, or a bit of 


28 


IMPEESSIOIS^S OF THEOPHKASTUS SUCH. 


gray thatch with patches of dark moss on its shoulder and 
a troop of grass-stems on its ridge, is a thing to visit. And 
then the tiled roof of cottage and homestead, of the long 
cow-shed where generations of the milky mothers have 
stood patiently, of the broad-shouldered barns where the 
old-fashioned flail once made resonant music, while the 
watch-dog barked at the timidly venturesome fowls making 
pecking raids on the outflying grain — the roofs that have 
looked out from among the elms and walnut trees, or be- 
side the yearly group of hay and corn stacks, or below the 
square stone steeple, gathering their gray or ochre-tinted 
lichens and their olive-green mosses under all ministries — 
let us praise the sober harmonies they give to our land- 
scape, helping to unite us pleasantly with the elder genera- 
tions who tilled the soil for us before we were born, and 
paid heavier and heavier taxes, with much grumbling, but 
without that deepest root of corruption — the self-indulgent 
despair which cuts down and consumes, and never plants. 

But I check myself. Perhaps this England of my affec- 
tions is half visionary — a dream in which things are con- 
nected according to my well-fed, lazy mood, and not at all 
by the multitudinous links of graver, sadder fact, such as 
belong everywhere to the story of human labor. Well,, 
well, the illusions that began for us when we were less ac- 
quainted with evil have not lost their value when we discern 
them to be illusions. They feed the ideal better, and in 
loving them still, we strengthen the precious habit of lov- 
ing something not visibly, tangibly existent, but a spiritual 
product of our visible, tangible selves. 

I cherish my childish loves — the memory of that warm 
little nest where my affections were fledged. Since then I 
have learned to care for foreign countries, for literature, 
foreign and ancient, for the life of Continental towns doz- 
ing round old cathedrals, for the life of London, half sleep- 
less ^h eager thought and strife, with indigestion or with 
hunger; and now my consciousness is chiefly of the busy, 
anxious metropolitan sort. My system responds sensitively 
to the London- weather-signs, political, social, literary; and 
my bachelor^s hearth is imbedded where, by much craning 
of head and neck, I can catch sight of a sycamore in the 
square garden: I belong to the Nation of London. 
Why? There have been many voluntary exiles in the 
world, and probably in the very flrst. exodus of the patri- 


IMPKESSIONS OF THEOPHKASTUS SUCH. 29 

archal Aryans — for I am determined not to fetch my ex- 
amples from races whose talk is of uncles and no fathers — 
some of those who sallied forth went for the sake of a loved 
companionship^ when they would willingly have kept sight 
of the familiar plains, and of the hills to which they had 
first lifted up their eyes. 


III. 

HOW WE EHCOUEAGE KESEAECH. 

The serene and beneficent goddess Truth, like other 
deities whose disposition has been too hastily inferred from 
that of the men who have invoked them, can hardly be 
well pleased with much of the worship paid to her even in 
this milder age, when the stake and the rack have ceased 
to form part of her ritual. Some cruelties still pass for 
service done in her honor; no thumb-screw is used, no iron 
boot, no scorching of flesh; but plenty of controversial 
bruising, laceration, and even life-long maiming. Less 
than formerly; but so long as this sort of truth-worship has 
the sanction of a public that can often understand nothing 
in a controversy except personal sarcasm or slanderous 
ridicule, it is likely to continue. The sufferings of its vic- 
tims are often as little regarded as those of the sacrificial 
pig offered in old time, with what we now regard as a sad 
miscalculation of effects. 

One such victim is my old acquaintance Merman. 

Twenty years ago Merman was a young man of promise, 
a conveyancer with a practice which had suddenly budded, 
but, like Aaron^s rod, seemed not destined to proceed fur- 
ther in that marvelous activity. Meanwhile he occupied 
himself in miscellaneous periodical writing and in a multi- 
farious study of moral and physical science. What chiefly 
attracted him in all subjects were the vexed questions which 
have the advantage of not admitting the decisive proof or 
disproof that renders many ingenious arguments superannu- 
ated. Not that Merman had a wrangling disposition: he 
put all his doubts, queries, and paradoxes deferentially, 
contended without unpleasant heat and only with a sono- 
rous eagerness against the personality of Homer, expressed 
himself civilly though firmly on the origin of language, 
and had tact enough to drop at the right moment such 


30 IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

subjects as the ultimate reduction of all the so-called ele- 
mentary substances^ his own total skepticism concerning 
Manetho^s chronology, or even the relation between the 
magnetic condition of the earth and the outbreak of revo- 
lutionary tendencies. Such flexibility was naturally much 
helped by his amiable feeling toward woman, whese nerv- 
ous system, he was convinced, would not bear the continu- 
ous strain of difiicult topics; and also by his willingness to 
contribute a song whenever the same desultory charmer 
proposed music. Indeed, his tastes were domestic enough 
to beguile him into marriage when his resources were still 
very moderate and partly uncertain. His friends wished 
that so ingenious and agreeable a fellow might have more 
prosperity than they ventured to hope for him, their chief 
regret on his acccount being that he did not concentrate 
his talent and leave ofl forming opinions on at least half a 
dozen of the subjects over which he scattered his attention, 
especially now that he had married a ^^nice little woman 
(the generic name for acquaintances^ wives when they are 
not markedly disagreeable). He could not, they observed, 
want all his various knowledge and Laputan ideas for his 
periodical writing which brought him most of his bread, 
and he would do well to use his talents in getting a specialty 
that would fit him for a post. Perhaps these well-disposed 
persons were a little rash in presuming that fltness for a 
post would be the surest ground for getting it; and on the 
whole, in now looking back on their wishes for Merman, 
their chief satisfaction must be that those wishes did not 
contribute to the actual result. 

For in an evil hour Merman did concentrate himself. 
He had for many years taken into his interest the compar- 
ative history of the ancient civilizations, but it had not 
preoccupied him so as to narrow his generous attention to 
everything else. One sleepless night, however (his wife has 
more 'Hian once narrated to me the details of an event 
memorable to her as the beginning of sorrows), after spending 
some hours over the epoch-making work of Grampus, a new 
idea seized him with regard to the possible connection of cer- 
tain symbolic monuments common to widely scattered races. 
Merman started up in bed. The night was cold, and the 
sudden withdrawal of warmth made his wife first dream of 
a snowball, and then cry: 

What is the matter^ Proteus?^^ 


IMPEESSIOKS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 31 

A great matter^ Julia. That fellow Grampus, whose 
book is cried up as a revelation, is all wrong about the 
Magicodumbras and the Zuzumotzis, and I have got hold 
of the right clew. 

^‘^Good gracious! does it matter so much? DonT drag 
the clothes, dear.'’^ 

It signifies this, Julia, that if I am right I shall set the 
world right; I shall regenerate history; I shall win the 
mind of Europe to a new view of social origins: I shall 
bruise the head of many superstitions.'’^ 

Oh no, dear, doiiT go too far into things. Lie down 
again. You have been dreaming. What are the Madicoj um- 
bras and Zuzitotzums? I never heard you talk of them 
before. What use can it be troubling yourself about such 
things 

That is the way, J ulia! That is the way wives alienate 
their husbands and make any hearth pleasanter to him 
than his own. 

^‘^^What do you mean, Proteus 

Why, if a woman will not try to understand her hus- 
band^s ideas, or at least to believe that they are of more 
value than she can understand — if she is to join anybody 
who happens to be against him, and suppose he is a fool 
because others contradict him — there is an end of our hap- 
piness. That is all I have to say. 

Oh no, Proteus, dear. I do believe what you say is 
right. That is my only guide. I am sure I have never 
had any opinions any other way: I mean about subjects. 
Of course there are many little things that w^ould tease you, 
that you like me to judge of for myself. I know I said 
once that I did not want you to sing ^ Oh, ruddier than the 
cherry,'’ because it was. not in your voice. But I can not 
remember ever differing from you about subjects, I never 
in my life thought any one cleverer than you.^^ 

Julia Merman was really a nice little woman, not one 
of the stately Dians sometimes spoken of in those terms. 
Her black silhouette had a very infantine aspect, but she 
had discernment and wisdom enough to act on the strong 
hint of that memorable conversation, never again giving 
her husband the slightest ground for suspecting that she 
thought treasonably of his ideas in relation to the Magico- 
dumbras and Zuzumotzis, or in the least relaxed her faith 
in his infallibility because Europe was not also convinced 


32 


IMPKESSIOKS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


of it. It was well for her that she did not increase her 
troubles in this way; but to do her justice^, what she was 
chiefly anxious about was to avoid increasing her husband^s 
troubles. 

Xot that these were great in the beginning. In the first 
development and writing out of his scheme, Merman had a 
more intense kind of intellectual pleasure than he had ever 
known before. His face became more radiant, his general 
view of human prospects more cheerful. Foreseeing that 
truth as presented by himself would win the recognition of 
his contemporaries, he excused with much liberality their 
rather rough treatment of other theorists whose basis was 
less perfect. His own periodical criticisms had never be- 
fore been so amiable: he was sorry for that unlucky 
majority whom the spirit of the age, or some other prompt- 
ing more definite and local, compelled to write without any 
particular ideas. The possession of an original theory which 
has not yet been assailed must certainly sweeten the temper 
of a man who is not beforehand ill-natured. And Merman 
was the reverse of ill-natured. 

But the hour of publication came; and to half a dozen 
persons, described as the learned world of two hemispheres, 
it became known that Grampus was attacked. This might 
have been a small matter, for who or what on earth that is 
good for anything is not assailed by ignorance, stupidity, or 
malice — and sometimes even by just objection? But on 
examination it appeared that the attack might possibly be 
held damaging, unless the ignorance of the author were 
well exposed, and his pretended facts shown to be chimeras 
of that remarkably hideous kind begotten by imperfect 
learning on the more feminine element of original in- 
capacity. Grampus himself did not immediately cut open 
the volume which Merman had been careful to send him, not 
without a very lively and shifting conception of the possible 
etfectki^i^hich the explosive gift might produce on the too 
eminent scholar — effects that must certainly have set in on 
the third day from the dispatch of the parcel. But in 
point of fact Grampus knew nothing of the book until his 
friend Lord Narwhal sent him an American news23aper con- 
taining a spirited article by the well-known Professor 
hjperm N. Whale, which was rather equivocal in its bearing, 
the passages quoted from Merman being of rather a telling 
sort, and the paragraphs which seemed to blow defiance 


IMPEESSIOl^S OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH, 33 

being unaccountably feeble^ coming from so distinguished 
a cetacean. Then^ by another post^ arrived letters from 
Butzkopf and Dugong, both men whose signatures were 
familiar to the Teutonic world in the Selten-erscheinende 
Monatschrift/^ or Hayrick for the insertion of Split Hairs, 
asking their master whether he meant to take up the com- 
bat, because, in the contrary case, both were ready. 

Thus America and Germany were roused, though Eng- 
land was still drowsy, and it seemed time now for Grampus- 
to find Hermann’s book under the heap and cut it open. 
For his own part, he was perfectly at ease about his system; 
but this is a world in which the truth requires defense, and 
specious falsehood must be met with exposure. Grampus, 
having once looked through the book, no longer wanted any 
urging to write the most crushing of replies. This, and 
nothing less than this, was due from him to the cause of 
sound inquiry; and the punishment would cost him little 
pains. In three weeks from that time the palpitating Mer- 
man saw his book announced in the programme of the 
leading review. No need for Grampus to put his signature. 
Who else had his vast, yet microscopic knowledge — who else 
his power of epithet? This article, in which Merman was 
pilloried and as good as mutilated — for he was shown to 
have neither ear nor nose for the subtleties of philological 
and archaeological study — was much read and more talked 
of, not because of any interest in the system of Grampus, 
or any precise conception of the danger attending lax views 
of the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, but because the 
sharp epigrams with which the victim was lacerated, and 
the soaring fountains of acrid mud which were shot upward 
and poured over the fresh wounds, were found amusing in 
recital. A favorite passage was one in which a certain kind 
of sciolist was described as a creature of the Walrus kind, 
having a phantasmal resemblance to higher animals when 
seen by ignorant minds in the twilight, dabbling or hobbling 
in first one element and then the other, without parts or 
organs suited to either; in fact, one of Nature^s impostors, 
who could not be said to have any artful pretenses, since a 
congenial incompetence to all precision of aim and move- 
ment made their every action a pretense — just as a being 
born in doeskin gloves would necessarily pass a judgment 
on surfaces, but we all know what his judgment would be 
worth. In drawing-room circles, and for the immediate 
2 . • . 


IMPRESSIOI^S OF THEOPHKASTIJS SUCH. 

this ingenious comparison was as damaging as the 
showing up of Hermanns mistakes^, and the mere smattering 
of linguistic and historical knowledge which he had pre- 
sumed to he a sufficient basis for theorizing; but the more 
learned cited his blunders aside to each other, and laughed 
the laugh of the initiated. In fact, Hermanns 'was a re- 
markable case of sudden notoriety. In London drums and 
clubs he was spoken of abundantly as one who had written 
ridiculously about the Magicod umbras and Zuzumotzis: the 
leaders of conversation, whether Christians, Jews, infidels, 
or of any other confession except the confession of ignor- 
ance, pronouncing him shallow and indiscreet, if not pre- 
sumptuous and absurd. He was heard of at Warsaw, and 
even Paris took knowledge of him. M. Cachalot had not 
read either Grampus or Merman, but he heard of their dis- 
pute in time to insert a paragraph upon it in his brilliant 
work, ^CL^orient au Point de Vue Actuel,^Hn which he was 
dispassionate enough to speak of Grampus as possessing a 
coup tVmil presqiie Frmi^ais in matters of historical inter- 
pretation, and of Merman as nevertheless an objector qui 
mcrite cVetre connu, M. Porpesse, also, availing himself 
of M. Cachalot’s knowledge, reproduced it in an article, 
with certain additions, which it is only fair to distinguish 
as his own, implying that the vigorous English of Grampus 
was not always as correct as a Frenchman could desire, 
while Merman's objections were more sophistical than solid. 
Presently, indeed, there appeared an able extrait of Gram- 
pus's article in the valuable ‘^Eapporteur Scientifique et 
Ilistorique," and Merman's mistakes were thus brought 
under the notice of certain Frenchmen, who are among 
the masters of those who know on Oriental subjects. In a 
word. Merman, though not extensively read, was extensive- 
ly read about. 

Meanwhile, how did he like it? Perhaps nobody, except 
his'Vife, for a moment reflected on that. An amused 
society considered that he was severely punished, but did 
not take the trouble to imagine his sensations; indeed this 
would have been a difficulty for persons less sensitive and 
excitable Ihan Merman himself. Perhaps that popular 
comjDarison of the W aims had truth enough to bite and 
blister on thorough application, even if exultant ignorance 
had not applauded it. But it was Well known that the 
walrus, though not in the least a malignant animal, if al- 


IMPKESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 85 

lowed to display its remarkably plain person and blunder- 
ing performances at ease in any element he chooses, be- 
comes desperately savage and musters alarming auxiliaries 
^vhen attacked or hurt. In this characteristic, at least. 
Merman resembled the walrus. And now he concentrated 
himself with a vengeance. That his counter-theory was 
fundamentally the right one he had a genuine conviction, 
whatever collateral mistakes he might have committed; and 
his bread would not cease to be bitter to him until he had 
convinced his contemporaries that Grampus had used his 
minute learning as a dust-cloud to hide sophistical evasions 
— that, in fact, minute learning was an obstacle to clear- 
sighted judgment, more especially with regard to the 
Magicod umbras and Zuzumotzis, and that the best prepara- 
tion in this matter was a wide survey of history and a di- 
versified observation of men. Still, Merman was resolved 
to muster all the learning within his reach, and he wander- 
ed day and night through many wildernesses of German 
print, he tried compendious methods of learning Oriental 
tongues, and, so to speak, getting at the marrow of lan- 
guages independently of the bones, for the chance of find- 
ing details to corroborate his own views, or possibly even to 
detect Grampus in some oversight or textual tampering. 
All other work was neglected; rare clients were sent away, 
and amazed editors found this maniac indifferent to his 
chance of getting book parcels from them. It was many 
months before Merman had satisfied himself that he was 
strong enough to face round uj)on his adversary. But at 
last he had prepared sixty condensed pages of eager argu- 
ment which seemed to him worthy to rank with the best 
models of controversial writing. He had acknowledged his 
mistakes, but had restated his theory, so as to show that it 
was left intact in spite of them; and he had even found 
cases in which Ziphius, Microps, Scrag Whale the explorer, 
and other cetaceans of unanswerable authority, were de- ' 
cidedly at issue with Grampus. Especially a passage cited 
by this last from that greatest of fossils Megalosaurus was 
demonstrated by Merman to be capable of three different 
interpretations, all preferable to that chosen by Grampus, 
who took the words in their most literal sense; for, 1*^, 
the incomparable Saurian, alike unequaled in close observa- 
tion and far-glancing comprehensiveness, might have 
meant those words ironically; 2^, motzis was probably a 


36 


IMPKESSIOKS OF TIIEOPHKASTUS SUCH. 


false reading for potzis, in which case its bearing was re- 
versed; and, 3^, it is known that in the age of the Saurians 
there were conceptions about the motzis which entirely re- 
move it from the category of things comprehensible in an 
age when Saurians run ridiculously small: all which views 
were godfathered by names quite fit to be ranked with that 
of Grampus. In fine. Merman wound up his rejoinder by 
sincerely thanking the eminent adversary, without whose 
fierce assault he might not have undertaken a revision, in 
the course of which he had met with unexpected and strik- 
ing confirmations of his own fundamental views. Evi- 
dently Hermanns anger was at white heat. 

The rejoinder being complete, all that remained was to 
find a suitable medium for its publication. This was not 
so easy. Distinguished mediums would not lend them- 
selves to contradictions of Grampus, or if they would. Mer- 
man ^s article was too long and too abstruse, while he would 
not consent to leave anything out of an article which had 
no superfluities; for all this happened years ago, when the 
world was at a different stage. At last, however, he got 
his rejoinder printed, and not on hard terms, since the 
medium, in every sense modest, did not ask him to pay for 
its insertion. 

But if Merman expected to call out Grampus again, he 
was mistaken. Everybody felt it too absurd that Merman 
should undertake to correct Grampus in matters of erudition, 
and an eminent man has something else to do than to refute 
a petty objector twice over. What was essential had been 
done: the public had been enabled to form a true judg- 
ment of Merman^s incapacity, the Magicodumbras and 
Zuzumotzis were but subsidiary elements in Grampuses 
system, and Merman might now be dealt with by younger 
members of the master^ s school. But he had at least the , 
satisfaction of finding that he had raised a discussion which 
would not be let die. The followers of Grampus took it up 
with an ardor and industry of research worthy or their ex- 
em23lar. Butzkopf made it the subject of an elaborate 
Einleitung to his important work, Die Bedeutung des 
^gyptischen Labyrinthes;^^ and Dugong, in a remarkable 
address which he delivered to a learned society in Central 
Europe, introduced Merman’s theory with so much power 
of sarcasm that it became a theme of more or less derisive 
allusion to men of many tongues. Merman with his 


IMPKESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 37 

Magicodiimbras and Zuzumotzis was on the way to become 
a proverb, being used illustratively by many able journalists 
who took those names of questionable things to be Hermanns 
own invention, than which, said one of the graver guides, 
^‘^we can recall few more melancholy examples of speculat- 
ive aberration/^ Naturally, the subject passed into popular 
literature, and figured very commonly in advertised pro- 
grammes. The fluent Loligo, the formidable Shark, and a 
younger member of his remarkable family known as S. Cata- 
lus, made a special reputation by their numerous articles, 
eloquent, lively, or abusive, all on the same theme, under 
titles ingeniously varied, alliterative, sonorous, or boldlyf an- 
ciful; such as,^^ Moments with Mr. Merman,^^ Mr. Merman 
and the Magicodumbras,^^ Greenland GramjDus and Pro- 
teus Merman, Grampian Heights and their Climbers, or 
the New Excelsior. They tossed him on short sentences; 
they swathed him in paragraphs of winding imagery; they 
found him at once a mere plagiarist and a theorizer of un- 
exampled perversity, ridiculously wrong about potzis and 
ignorant of Pali; they hinted, indeed, at certain things 
which to their knowledge he had silently brooded over in 
his boyhood, and seemed tolerably well assured that this 
preposterous attempt to gainsay an incomparable cetacean 
of world-wide fame had its origin in a peculiar mixture of 
bitterness and eccentricity, which, rightly estimated and 
seen in its definite proportions, would furnish the best key 
to his argumentation. All alike were sorry for Merman^s 
lack of sound learning, but how could their readers be sorry 
Sound learning would not have been amusing; and as it 
was. Merman was made to furnish these readers with 
amusement at no expense of trouble on their part. Even 
burlesque writers looked into his book to see where it could 
be made use of, and those who did not know him were de- 
sirous of meeting him at dinner, as one likely to feed their 
comic vein. 

On the other hand, he made a serious figure in sermons 
under the name of Some or Others who had attempt- 
ed presumptuously to scale eminences too high and arduous 
for human ability, and had given an example of ignomini- 
ous failure edifying to the humble Christian. 

All this might be very advantageous for able persons 
whose superfluous fund of expression needed a paying in- 
vestment^ but the effeot on Merman himself was unhappily 


38 


IMPRESSlOiqS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


not so transient as the busy writing and speaking of which 
he had become the occasion. His certainty that he was 
right naturally got stronger in proportion as the spirit of 
resistance was stimulated. The scorn and unfairness with 
which he felt himself to have been treated by those really 
competent to appreciate his ideas had galled him and made 
a chronic sore; and the exultant chorus of the incompetent 
seemed a pouring of vinegar on his wound. His brain be- 
came a registry of the foolish and ignorant objections made 
against him^ and of continually amplified answers to these 
objections. Unable to get his answers printed, he had re- 
course to that more primitive mode of publication, oral 
transmission or button-holding, now generally regarded as 
a troublesome survival, and the once pleasant, flexible Mer- 
man was on the way to be shunned as a bore. His interest 
in new acquaintances turned chiefly on the possibility that 
they would care about the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis; 
that they would listen to his complaints and exposures of 
unfairness, and not only accept copies of what he had writ- 
ten on the subject, but send him appreciative letters in ac- 
knowledgment. Kepeated disappointment of such hopes 
tended to embitter him, and not the less because after 
awhile the fashion of mentioning him died out, allusions to 
his theory were less understood, and people could only pre- 
tend to remember it. And all the while Merman was per- 
fectly sure that his very opponents who had knowledge 
enough to be capable judges were aware that his book, 
whatever errors of statement they might detect in it, had 
served as a sort of divining-rod, pointing out hidden sources 
of historical interpretation; nay, his jealous examination 
discerned in a new work by Grampus himself a certain 
shifting of ground which — so poor Merman declared — was 
the sign of an intention gradually to ajDpropriate Hie views 
of the man he had attempted to brand as an ignorant im- 
postorr 

And Julia? And the housekeej)ing? — the rent, food, 
and clothing, which controversy can hardly su2i2ily, unless 
it be of the kind that serves as a recommendation to cer- 
tain posts. Controversial pamphlets have been known to 
earn large plums; but nothing of the sort could be ex- 
pected from unpractical heresies about the Magicodumbras 
and Zuzumotzis. Painfully the contrary. Merman^s rep- 
utation as a sober thinker, a safe writer, a sound lawyer, 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 39 

was irretrievably injured: the distractions of controversy 
had caused him to neglect useful editorial connections, and 
indeed his dwindling care for miscellaneous subjects made 
his contributions too dull to be desirable. Even if he could 
now have given a. new turn to his concentration, and ap- 
plied his talents so as to be ready to show himself an ex- 
ceptionally qualified lawyer, he would only have been like 
an architect in competition, * too late with his superior 
plans; he would not have had an opportunity of showing 
his qualification. He was thrown out of the course. The 
small capital which had filled up deficiencies of income 
was almost exhausted, and Julia, in the elfork to make 
supplies equal to wants, had to use much ingenuity in 
diminishing the wants. The brave and affectionate woman • 
whose small outline, so unimpressive against an illuminated 
background, held within it a good share of feminine hero- 
ism, did her best to keep up the charm of home and soothe 
her husband^’s excitement; parting with the best jewel 
among her wedding presents in order to pay the rent, with- 
out ever hinting to her husband that this sad result had 
come of his undertaking to convince people who only 
laughed at him. She was a resigned little creature, and 
refiected that some husbands took to drinking and others 
to forgery: hers had only taken to the Magicodumbras and 
Zuzumotzis, and was not unkind — only a little more- in- 
different to her and the two children than she had ever ex- 
pected he would be, his mind being eaten up with sub- 
jects, and constantly a little angry, not with her, but with 
everybody else, especially those who were celebrated. 

This was the sad truth. Merman felt himself ill-used by 
the world, and thought very much worse of the world in 
consequence. The gall of his adversaries^ ink had been 
sucked into his system and ran in his blood. He was still 
in the prime of life, but his mind was aged by that eager, 
monotonous construction which comes of feverish excite- 
ment on a single topic, and uses up the intellectual 
strength. 

Merman had never been a rich man, but he was now con- 
s])icuously poor, and in need of the friends who had power 
or interest which he believed they could exert on his behalf. 
Their omitting or declining to give this help could not 
seem to him so clearly as to them an inevitable consequence 
of his having become impracticable, or at least of his pass- 


40 IMPKESSIOKS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

ing for a man whose views were not likely to be safe and 
sober. Each friend in turn offended him, though unwill- 
ingly, and was suspected of wishing to shake him off. It 
was not altogether so; but poor Merman^s society had un- 
deniably ceased to be attractive, and it was difficult to help 
him. At last the pressure of want urged him to try for a 
post far beneath his earlier prospects, and he gained it. He 
holds it still, for he has no vices, and his domestic life has 
kept up a sweetening current of motive around and within 
him. Nevertheless, the bitter flavor mingling itself with 
all topics, the premature weariness and withering, are irrev- 
ocably there. It is as if he had gone through a disease 
which alters what we call the constitution. He has long 
.ceased to talk eagerly of the ideas which possess him, or to 
attempt making proselytes. The dial has moved onward, 
and he himself sees many of his former guesses in a neAV 
light. On the other hand, he has seen what he foreboded, 
that the main idea which was at the root of his too rash 
theorizing has been adopted by Grampus and received with 
general respect, no reference being heard to tlie ridiculous 
figure this important conception made when ushered in by 
the incompetent Others.'^’ 

Now and then, on rare occasions, wheji a sympathetic 
Ute-a-fMe has restored some of his old expansiveness, he 
Avill tell a companion in a railway-carriage, or other place 
of meeting favorable to autobiographical confidences, what 
has been the course of things in his particular case, as an 
example of the justice to be expected of the world. The 
companion usually allows for the bitterness of a disappointed 
man, and is secretly disinclined to believe that Grampus 
was to blame. 


IV. 


A MAH SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGIHALITY. 

Amoho the many acute sayings of La Rochefoucauld, 
there is hardly one more acute than this. La plus grande 
ambition n^en a pas la moindre apparence lorsqu^elle se 
rencontre clans une impossibilite absolue cTarriver on elle 
aspire. Some of us might do well to use this hint in our 
treatment of acquaintances and friends from whom we are 


IMPKESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


41 


expecting gratitude, because we are so very kind in think- 
ing of them, inviting them, and even listening to what they 
say — considering how insignificant they must feel them- 
selves to be. We are often fallaciously confident in suppos- 
ing that our friend^s state of mind is appropriate to our 
moderate estimate of his importance : almost as if we im- 
agined the humble mollusk (so useful as an illustration) to 
have a sense of his own exceeding softness and low place in 
the scale of being. Your mollusk, on the contrary, is in- 
wardly objecting to every other grade of solid rather than 
to himself. Accustomed to observe what we think an un- 
warrantable conceit exhibiting itself in ridiculous preten- 
sions and forwardness to play the lion^s part, in obvious 
self-complacency and loud peremptoriness, we are not on 
the alert to detect the egotistic claims of a more exorbitant 
kind often hidden under an apparent neutrality or an ac- 
quiescence in being put out of the question. 

Thoughts of this kind occurred to me yesterday when I 
saw the name of Lentulus in the obituary. The majority 
of his acqaintances, I imagine, have always thought of him 
as a man justly unpretending and as nobody^s rival; but 
some of them have, perhaps, been struck with sur]irise at 
his reserve in praising the works of his contemporaries, and 
have now and then felt themselves in need of a key to his 
remarks.on men of celebrity in various departments. He 
was a man of fair position, deriving his income from a busi- 
ness in which he did nothing, at leisure to frequent clubs 
and at ease in giving dinners; well-looking, polite, and gen- 
erally acceptable in society as a part of what we may call its 
bread-crumb — the neutral basis needful for the plums and 
spice. Why, then, did ne speak of the modern Maro or 
the modern Flaccus with a peculiarity in his tone of assent 
to other people^s praise which might almost have led you to 
suppose that the eminent poet had borrowed money of him, 
and showed an indisposition to repay? He had no criticism 
to offer, no sign of objection more specific than a slight 
cough, a scarcely perceptible pause before assenting, and 
an air of self-control in his utterance — as if certain con- 
siderations had determined him not to inform against the 
so-called poet, who to his knowledge was a mere versifier. 
If you had questioned him closely, he would perhaps have 
confessed that he did think something better might be done 
in the way of Eclogues and Georgies, or of Odes and Epodes, 


42 IMPRESSTONS OF THKOPHRABTUS SUCH. 

and that to his mind poetry was something very dif- 
ferent from what had hitherto been known under that 
name. 

For my own part, being of a superstitious nature, given 
readily to imagine alarming causes, I immediately, on first 
getting these mystic hints from Lentulus, concluded that 
he held a number of entirely original poems, or at the very 
least a revolutionary treatise on poetics, in that melancholy 
manuscript state to which works excelling all that is ever 
printed are necessarily condemned ; and 1 was long timid 
in speaking of the poets when he was present. For what 
might not Lentulus have done, or be profoundly aware of, 
that would make my ignorant impressions ridiculous? One 
can not well be sure of the negative in such a case, except 
through certain positives that bear witness to it; and those 
witnesses are not always to be got hold of. But the time 
wearing on, I perceive that the attitude of Lentulus toward 
the philosophers was essentially the same as his attitude to- 
ward the poets; nay, there was something so much more 
decided in his mode of closing his mouth after brief speech 
on the former, there was such an air of rapt consciousness 
in his private hints as to his conviction that all thinking 
hitherto had been an elaborate mistake, and as to his own 
power of conceiving a sound basis for a lasting superstruct- 
ure, that I began to believe less in the poetical stores, and 
to infer that the line of Lentulus lay rather in the“ rational 
criticism of our beliefs and in systematic construction. In' 
this case I did not figure to myself the existence of formi- 
dable manuscripts ready for the press; for great thinkers 
are known to carry their theories growing within their 
minds long before committing them to paper, and the ideas 
which made a new passion for them when their locks were 
jet or auburn, remain perilously unwritten, an inwardly 
developing condition of their successive selves, until the 
locks are gray or scanty. I only meditated improvingly on 
the way in which a man of exceptional faculties, and even 
carrying within him some of that fierce refiner^s fire which 
is to purge away the dross of human error, may move about 
in society totally unrecognized, regarded as a person whose 
opinion is superfluous, and only rising into a power in 
emergencies of threatened black-balling. Imagine a Des- 
cartes or a Locke being recognized for nothing more than 
a good fellow and a perfect gentleman — what a painful 


IMPRESSIONS OF TIFEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 43 

view does such a picture suggest of impenetrable dullness in 
the society around them. 

I would at all times rather be reduced to a cheaper esti- 
mate of a particular person, if by that means I can get a 
more cheerful view of my fellow-men generally; and I con- 
fess that in a certain curiosity which led me to cultivate 
Lentulus^s acquaintance, my hope leaned to the discovery 
that he was a less remarkable man than he had seemed to 
imply. It would have been a grief to discover that he was 
bitter or malicious, but by finding him to be neither a 
mighty poet, nor a revolutionary poetical critic, nor an 
epoch-making philosopher, my admiration for the poets 
and thinkers whom he rated so low would recover all its 
buoyancy, and I should not be left to trust to that very sus- 
picious sort of merit which constitutes an exception in the 
history of mankind, and recommends itself as the total 
abolitionist of all previous claims on our confidence. You 
are not greatly surprised at the infirm logic of the coach- 
man who would persuade you to engage him by insisting 
that any other would be sure to rob you in the matter of 
hay and corn, thus demanding a difficult belief in him as 
the sole exception from the frailties of his calling; but it 
is rather astonishing that the wholesale decriers of mankind 
and its performances should be even more unwary in their 
reasoning than the coachman, since each of them not 
merely confides in your regarding himself as an exception, 
but overlooks the almost certain fact that you are won- 
dering whether he inwardly excepts you. Now, conscious 
of entertaining some common opinions which seemed to 
fall under the mildly intimated but sweeping ban of Len- 
tulus, my self-complacency was a little concerned. 

Hence I deliberately attempted to draw out Lentulus in 
private dialogue; for it is the reverse of injury to a man to 
offer him that hearing which he seems to have found no- 
where else. And for whatever purposes silence may be 
equal to gold, it can not be safely taken as an indication of 
specific ideas. I sought to know why Lentulus was more 
than indifferent to the poets, and what was that new poetry 
which he had either written or, as to its principles, distinctly 
conceived. But I presently found that he knew very little 
of any particular poet, and had a general notion of poetry 
as the use of artificial language t^o express unreal senti- 
ments: he instanced ^^The Giaour, ^^Lalla Rookh,*’^ 


44 IMPRESSIONS OP THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

The Pleasures of Hope/^ and ^^Euin seize thee, ruthless^ 
King;^^ adding, ^^and plenty more.^" On my observing 
that he probably preferred a larger, simpler style, he em- 
j^hatically assented. ^^Have you not,"^ said I, /^vritten 
something of that order ^^No; but I often compose as 
I go along. I see how things might be written as fine as 
Ossian, only with true ideas. The world has no notion 
Avhat poetry will be. 

It was impossible to disprove this, and I am always glad 
to believe that the poverty of our imagination is no measure 
of the workPs resources. Our posterity will no doubt get 
fuel in ways that we are unable to devise for them. But 
what this conversation persuaded me of was, that the birth 
with which the mind of Lentulus was pregnant could not 
be poetry, though I did not question that he composed as 
he went along, and that the exercise was accompanied with 
a great sense of power. 'This is a frequent experience in 
dreams, and much of our waking experience is but a dream 
in the daylight. Nay, for -what I saw, the compositions 
might be fairly classed as Ossianic. But I was satisfied 
that Lentulus could not disturb my grateful admiration for 
the poets of all ages by eclipsing them, or by putting them 
under a new electric light of criticism. 

Still, he had himself thrown the chief emphasis of his 
protest and his consciousness of corrective illumination on 
the philosophic thinking of our race, and his tone in assur- 
ing me that everything which had been done in that way 
was wrong — that Plato, Eobert Owen, and Dr. Tuffie, who 
wrote in the Eegulator,^^ were all equally mistaken, gave 
my superstitious nature a thrill of anxiety. After what 
had passed about the poets, it did not seem likely that 
Lentulus had all systems by heart; but who coulfl say he 
had not seized that thread which may somewhere hang out 
loosely Jrom the web of things and be the clew of unravel- 
ment? We need not go far to learn that a prophet is not 
made by erudition. Lentulus at least had not the bias of a 
school; and if it turned out that he was in agreement with 
any celebrated thinker, ancient or modern, the agreement 
would have the value of an undesigned coincidence not due 
to forgotten reading. It was therefore witli renewed 
curiosity that I engaged liim on this large subject — the 
universal erroiieousness of thinking up to the period when 
Lentulus began that process. And here I found him more 


IMPEESSIOKS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


45 


copious than on the theme of poetry. He admitted that he 
did contemplate writing down his thoughts^ but his diffi- 
cidty was their abundance. Apparently he was like the 
wood-cutter entering the thick forest, and saying Where 
shall T begin The same obstacle appeared in a minor 
degree to cling about his verbal exposition, and accounted 
perhaps for his rather helter-skelter choice of remarks bear- 
ing on the number of unaddressed letters sent to the post- 
office; on what logic really is, as tending to support the 
buoyancy of human mediums and mahogany tables; on the 
probability of all miracles under all religions when ex- 
plained by hidden laws, and my unreasonableness in sup- 
posing that their profuse occurrence at half a guinea an 
hour in recent times was anything more than a coincidence ; 
on the hap-hazard way in which marriages are determined 
— showing the baselessness of social and moral schemes; 
and on liis expectation that he should offend the scientific 
world wlien he told them what he thought of electricity as 
an agent. 

JSTo man^s appearance could be graver or more gentle- 
man-like than that of Lentulus as we walked along the Mall 
while he delivered these observations, understood by him- 
self to have a regenerative bearing on human society. His 
wristbands and black gloves, his hat and nicely clipped 
hair, his laudable moderation in beard, and his evident dis- 
crimination in choosing his tailor, all seemed to excuse the 
prevalent estimate of him as a man untainted with 
heterodoxy, and likely to be so unencumbered with opinions 
that he would always be useful as an assenting and admir- 
ing listener. Men of science, seeing him at their lectures, 
doubtless flattered themselves that he came to learn from 
them; the philosophic ornaments of our times, expounding 
some of their luminous ideas in the social circle, took the 
meditative gaze of Lentulus for one of surprise, not uii- 
mixed with a just reverence of such close reasoning toward 
so novel a conclusion; and those who are called men of the 
Avorld considered him a good fellow, who might be asked to 
vote for a friend of their own, and would have no trouble- 
some notions to make him unaccommodating. You per- 
ceive how very much they were all mistaken, except in 
qualifying him as a good fellow. 

This Lentulus certainly was, in the sense of being free 
from envy, hatred, and malice; and such freedom was all 


46 


IMPKESSIONS OF THEOPHKASTUS SUCH. 


the more remarkable an indication of native benignity^ be- 
cause of his gaseous, inimitably expansive conceit. Yes, 
conceit; for that his enormous and contentedly ignorant 
confidence in his own rambling thoughts was usually 
clad in a decent silence, is no. reason why it should be 
less strictly called by the name directly implying a 
complacent self-estimate unwarranted by performance. 
Nay, the total privacy in which he enjoyed his conscious- 
ness of inspiration was the very condition of its undis- 
turbed placid nourishment and gigantic growth. Your 
audibly arrogant man exposes himself to tests; in attempt- 
ing to make an impression on others, he may possibly (not 
always) be made to feel his own lack of definiteness; and 
the demand for definiteness is to all of us a needf id check 
on vague depreciation of what others do, and vague ecstatic 
trust in our own superior ability. But Lentulus was at 
once so unreceptive, and so little gifted with the power of 
displaying his miscellaneous deficiency of information, that 
there was really nothing to hinder his astonishment at the 
spontaneous crop of ideas which his mind secretly yielded. 
If it occurred to him that there were more meanings than 
one for the word motive,^^ since it sometimes meant the 
end aimed at, and sometimes the feeling that prompted the 
aiming, and that the word cause was also of changeable 
import, he was naturally struck with the truth of his own 
lierception, and was convinced that if this vein were well 
followed out much might be made of it. Men were evident- 
ly in the wrong about cause and effect, else why was society 
in the confused state we behold? And as to motive, Lentu- 
lus felt that when he came to write down his views he 
should look deeply into this kind of subject, and show up 
thereby the anomalies of our social institutions; meanwhile 
the various aspects of motive and cause flitted about 
among the motley crowd of ideas which he regajxled as origi- 
nal, and pregnant with reformative efficacy. For his un- 
affected good-will made him regard all his insight as only 
valuable because it tended toward reform. 

The respectable man had got into his illusory maze of 
discoveries by letting go that clew of conformity in his 
thinking which he had kept fast hold of in his tailoring and 
manners. He regarded heterodoxy as a power in itself, 
and took his inacquaintance with doctrines for a creative 
dissidence. But Ids epitaph needs not to be a melancholy 


IMPBESSTOKS OF THEOPirRASTUS SUCH. 


47 


one. His benevolent disposition was more effective for 
good than his silent presumption for harm. He might 
have been mischievous but for the lack of words; instead of- 
being astonished at his inspirations in private^ he might 
have clad his addled originalities, disjointed commonplaces, 
blind denials, and balloon-like conclusions in that mighty 
sort of language which would have made a new Koran for 
a knot of followers. I mean no disrespect to the ancient 
Koran, but one would not desire the roc to lay more eggs, 
and give us a whole wing-flapping brood to soar and make 
twilight. 

Peace be with Lentulus, for he has left us in peace. 
Blessed is the man who having nothing to say, abstains 
from giving us wordy evidence of the fact — from calling 
on us to look through a heap of millet-seed in order to be 
sure that there is no pearl in it. 


V. 

A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN. 

A LITTLE unpremeditated insincerity must be indulged 
under the stress of social intercourse. The talk even of an 
honest man must often represent merely his wish to be in- 
offensive or agreeable, rather than his genuine opinion or 
feeling on the matter in hand. His thought, if uttered, 
might be wounding; or he has not the ability to utter it 
with exactness, and snatches at a loose paraphrase; or he 
has really no genuine thought on the question, and is driv- 
en to fill up the vacancy by borrowing the remarks in 
vogue. These are the winds and currents we have all to 
steer among, and they are often too strong for our truth- 
fulness or our wit. Let us not bear too hardly on each 
other for this common incidental frailty, or think that we 
rise superior to it by dropping all considerateness and def- 
erence. 

But there are studious, deliberate forms of insincerity 
which it is fair to be impatient with; Hinze% for example. 
From his name you might suppose him to be a German; in 
fact, his family is Alsatian, but has been settled in England 
for more than one generation. ' He is the superlatively def- 
erential man, and walks about with murmured wonder at 
the wisdom and discernment of everybody who talks to him. 


48 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


He cultivates the low-toned tHe^a-tete, keeping his hat 
carefully in his hand and often stroking it, while he smiles 
with downcast eyes, as if to relieve his feelings under the 
pressure of the remarkable conversation which it is his 
honor to enjoy at the present moment. I confess to some 
rage on hearing him yesterday talking to Felicia, who is 
certainly a clever woman, and, without any unusual desire 
to show her cleverness, occasionally says something of her 
own, or makes an allusion which is not quite common. 
Still, it must happen to her, as to every one else, to speak 
of many subjects on which the best things were said long 
ago, and in conversation with a person who has been newly 
introduced, those well-worn themes naturally recur as a 
further development of salutations and preliminary media 
of understanding, such as pipes, chocolate, or mastic-chew- 
ing, which serve to confirm the impression that pur new 
acquaintance is on a civilized footing, and has enough re- 
gard for formulas to save us from shocking outbursts of in- 
dividualism, to which we are always exposed with the tamest 
bear or baboon. Considered purely as a matter of infor- 
mation, it cannot any longer be important for iis to learn 
that a British subject included in the last census holds 
Shakspeare to be supreme in the presentation of character; 
still, it is as admissible for any one to make this statement 
about himself as to rub his hands and tell you that the air 
is brisk, if only he will let it fall as a matter of course, 
with a parenthetic lightness, and not announce his adhesion 
to a commonplace with an emphatic insistance, as if it were 
a proof of singular insight. We mortals should chiefly like 
to talk to each other out of good-will and fellowship, not 
for the sake of hearing revelations or being stimulated by 
witticisms; and I have usually found that it is the rather 
dull person who appears to be disgusted with his contem- 
poraries because they are not always strikingly original, and 
to s'^sfy whom the party at a country house should have 
included the prophet Isaiah, Plato, Francis Bacon, and Vol- 
taire. It is always our heaviest bore who is astonished at 
the tameness of modern celebrities; naturally; for a little of 
his company has reduced them to a state of flaccid fatigue. 
It is right and meet that there should be an abundant ut- 
terance of good sound commonplaces. Part of an agree- 
able talker^s charm is tliat he lets them fall continually 
with no more than their due emphasis. Giving a pleasant 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 49 

voice to what we are all well assured of, makes a sort of 
wholesome air for more special and dubious remark to 
move in. 

Hence it seemed to me far from unbecoming in Felicia 
that in her 'first dialogue with Hinze, previously quite a 
stranger to her, her observations were those of an ordina- 
rily refined and well-educated woman on standard subjects, 
and might ^lave been printed in a manual of polite topics 
and creditable opinions. She had no desire to astonish a 
man of whom she had heard nothing particular. It was 
all the more exasperating to see and hear Hinze^s reception 
of her well-bred conformities. Felicia^s acquaintances 
know her as the suitable wife of a distinguished man, a 
sensible, vivacious, kindly disposed woman, heljiing her 
husband with graceful apologies written and spoken, and 
making her recejitions agreeable to all comers. But you 
would have imagined that Hinze had been prepared by gen- 
eral report to regard this introduction to her as an oppo\'- 
tunity comparable to an audience of the Delphic Sibyl. 
When she had delivered herself on the changes in Italian 
travel, on the difficulty of reading Ariosto in these busy 
tinies, on the want of equilibrium in French political af- 
fairs, and on the pre-eminence of German music, he would 
know what to think. Felicia was evidently embarrassed by 
his reverent wonder, and, in dread lest she should seem to 
be playing the oracle, became somewhat confused, stum- 
bling on Iier answers rather than choosing them. But this 
made no difference to Hinze^s rapt attention and subdued 
eagerness of inquiry. He continued to put large questions, 
bending his head slightly, that his eyes might be a little 
lifted in awaiting her reply. 

What, may I ask, is your opinion as to the state of art 
in England 

Oh,^^ said Felicia, with a light deprecatory laugh, I 
think it suffers from two diseases — bad taste in thepatroniS, 
and want of inspiration in the artists. 

^^That is true indeed, said Hinze, in an undertone of 
deep conviction. You have put your finger with strict 
accuracy on the causes of decline. To a cultivated taste 
like yours this must be particularly painful/^ 

I did not say there was actual decline, said 'Felicia, 
with a touch of brusquerie. I donT set myself up as the 
great personage whom nothing can please. 


50 


IMPEESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


That would be too severe a misfortune for others/^ says 
my complimentary ape. You approve^ perhaps^ of Rose- 
mary^s ‘ Babes in the Wood/ as something fresh and naive 
in sculpture 

I think it enchanting.’^ 

‘‘Does he know that? Or will you permit me to tell 
him?” 

“ Heaven forbid! It would be an impertinence in me to 
praise a work of his — to pronounce on its quality; and that 
I happen to like it can be of no consequence to him.” 

Here was an occasion for Hinze to smile down on his hat 
and stroke it— Felicia’s ignorance that her praise was ines- 
timable being peculiarly noteworthy to an observer of man- 
kind. Presently he was quite sure that her favorite author 
was Shakespeare^ and wished to know what she thought of 
Hamlet’s madness. When she had quoted Wilhelm Meister 
on this point, and had afterward testified that “Lear ’’was 
bpyond adequate presentation, that “Julius Caesar ” was an 
effective acting play, and that a poet may know a good 
deal about human nature while knowing little of geography, 
Hinze appeared so impressed with the plenitude of these 
revelations that he recapitulated them, weaving them to- 
gether with threads of compliment, “ As you very justly 
observed;” and, “It is most true, as you say;” and, “It 
were well if others noted what you have remarked. ” 

Some listeners, incautious in their epithets, would have 
called Hinze an “ ass.” For my part, I would never insult 
that intelligent and unpretending animal, who no doubt 
brays with perfect simplicity and substantial ‘ meaning to 
those acquainted with his idiom, and if he feigns more sub- 
mission than he feels, has weighty reasons for doing so — I 
would never, I say, insult that historic and ill-appreciated 
animal, the ass, by giving his name to a man whose con- 
tinuous pretense is so shallow in its motive, so unexcused 
by anyisharp appetite as this of Hinze’s. 

But perhaps you would say that his adulatory manner was 
originally adopted under strong promptings of self-interest, 
and that his absurdly overacted deference to persons from 
whom he expects no patronage is the unrefiecting persist- 
ence of habit — just as those who live with the deaf will 
shout to everybody else. 

^ And you might indeed imagine that in talking to Tul- 
pian, who has considerable interest at his disposal, Hinze 


IMPRESSIONS OE THEOPFRASTTTS SUCH. 51 

had a desired appointment in his mind. Tulpian is ap- 
pealed to on innumerable subjects, and if he is unwilling 
to express himself on any one of them, says so with instruct- 
ive copiousness: he is much listened to, and his utterances 
are registered and reported with more or less exactitude. 
But I think he has ho other listener who comports himself 
as Hinze does — who, figuratively speaking, carries about a 
small spoon ready to pick up any dusty crumb of opinion 
that the eloquent man may have let drop. Tulpian, with 
reverence be it said, has some rather absurd notions, such 
as a mind of large discourse often finds room for: they slip 
about among his higher conceptions and multitudinous ac- 
quirements like disreputable characters at a national cele- 
bration in some vast cathedral, where to the ardent soul all is 
glorified by rainbow light and grand associations: any vulgar 
detective knows them for what they are. But Hinze is es- 
pecially fervid . in his desire to hear Tulpian dilate on his 
crotchets, and is rather troublesome to by-standers in ask- 
ing them whether they have read the various fugitive 
writings in which these crotchets have been published. If 
an expert is explaining some matter on which you desire to 
know the evidence, Hinze teases you with Tulpian^s guesses, 
and asks the expert what he thinks of them. 

In general, Hinze delights in the citation of opinions, 
and would hardly remark that the sun shone without an 
air of respectful appeal or fervid adhesion. The ^‘^Iliad,'’^ 
one sees, would impress him little if it were not for what 
Mr. Fugleman has lately said about it; and if you mention 
an image or^entiment in Chaucer he seems not to heed the 
bearing of your reference, but immediately tells you tliat 
Mr. Hautboy, too, regards Chaucer as a poet of the first 
order, and he is delighted to find that two such judges as 
you and Hautboy are at one. 

What is the reason of all this subdued ecstasy, moving 
about, hat in hand, with well-dressed hair and attitudes of 
unimpeachable correctness? Some persons conscious of 
sagacity decide at once that Hinze knows what he is about 
in flattering Tulpian, and has a carefully appraised end to 
serve, though they may not see it. They are misled by the 
common mistake of supposing that men ^s behavior, whether 
habitual or occasional, is chiefly determined by a dis- 
tinctly conceived motive, a definite object to be gained or 
a definite evil to be avoided. Tlie truth is, that, the prim- 


52 IMPRTISSIOKS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

itive wants of nature once tolerably satisfied, the majority 
of mankind, even in a civilized life full of solicitations, are 
with difficulty aroused to the distinct conception of an ob- 
ject toward which they will direct their actions with careful 
adaptation, and it is yet rarer to find one who can persist 
in the systematic pursuit of such an end. Few lives are 
shaped, few characters formed, by the contemplation of 
definite consequences seen from a distance and made the 
goal of continuous effort or the beacon of a constantly 
avoided danger: such control by foresight, such vivid pict- 
uring and practical logic, are the distinction of exception- 
ally strong natures; but society is chiefiy made up of hm 
man beings whose daily acts are all performed either in 
unreflecting obedience to custom and routine or from im- 
mediate promptings of thought or feeling to execute an im- 
mediate purpose. They pay their poor-rates, give their vote 
in affairs political or parochial, wear a certain amount of 
starch, hinder boys from tormenting the helpless, and 
spend money on tedious observances called pleasures, with- 
out mentally adjusting these practices to their own well- 
understood interest, or to the general, ultimate welfare of 
the human race; and when they fall into ungraceful com- 
pliment, excessive smiling or other luckless efforts of com- 
plaisant behavior, these are but the tricks or habits gradu- 
ally formed under the successive promptings of a wish to be 
agreeable, stimulated day by day without any Avidening 
resources for gratifying the wish. It does not in the least 
follow that they are seeking by studied hypocrisy to get 
something f^r themselves. And so with Hii^e^s deferen- 
tial bearing, complimentary parentheses, and worshipful 
tones, which seem to some like the overacting of a part in 
a comedy. He expects no appointment or other appre- 
ciable gain through Tulpian^s favor; he has no doubleness 
toward Felicia; there is no sneering or back-biting obverse 
to his~ecstatic admiration. He is very well off in the world, 
and cherishes no unsatisfied ambition that could feed design 
and direct flattery. As you perceive, he has had the edu- 
cation and other advantages of a gentleman without being 
conscious of marked result, such as a decided preference for 
any particular ideas or functions: his mind is furnished as 
hotels are, with everything for occasional and transient use. 
ilut one can not be an Englishman and gentleman in gen- 
eral : it is in the nature of things that one must have an in- 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


53 


dividuality^ though it may be of an often-repeated type. As 
Hinze, in growing to maturity, had grown into a particular 
form and expression of person, so he necessarily gathered a 
manner and frame of speech which made him additionally 
recognizable. His nature is not tuned to the pitch of a gen- 
uine direct admiration, only to an attitudinizing deference 
which does not fatigue itself with the formation of real 
judgments. All human achievement must be wrought 
down to this spoon-meat — this mixture of other persons’ 
washy opinions and his own flux of reverence for what is 
tliird-hand, before Hinze can And a relish for it. 

He has no more leading characteristic than the desire to 
stand well with those who are justly distinguished; he has 
no base admirations, and you may know by his entire pres- 
entation of himself, from the management of his hat to the 
angle at which he keeps his right foot, that he aspires to 
correctness. Desiring to behave becomingly, and also to 
make a figure in dialogue, he is only like the bad artist 
whose picture is a failure. We may pity these ill-gifted 
strivers, but not pretend that their works are pleasant to 
behold. A man is bound to know something of his own 
weight and muscular dexterity, and the puny athlete is 
called foolish before he is seen to be thrown. Hinze has 
not the stutf in him to be at once agreeably conversational 
and sincere, and he has got himself up to be at all events 
agreeably conversational. Notwithstanding this deliberate- 
ness of intention in his talk he is unconscious of falsity, for 
he has not enough of deep and lasting impression to find a 
contrast or diversity between his words and his thoughts. 
He is not fairly to be called a hypocrite, but I have already 
confessed to the more exasperation at his make-believe rev- 
erence, because it has no deep hunger to excuse it. 


VI. 

ONLY TEMPER. 

What is temper? Its primary meaning, the proportion 
and mode in which qualities are mingled, is much neglect- 
ed in popular speech, yet even here the word often carries 
a reference to a habitual state or general tendency of the 
organism in distinction from what are held to be specific 


54 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


virtues and vices. As people confess to bad memory with- 
out expecting to sink in mental reputation, so we hear a 
man declared to have a bad temper, and yet glorified as the 
possessor of every high quality. When he errs or in any 
way commits himself, his temper is accused, not his char- 
acter, and it is understood that but for a brutal bearish 
mood he is kindness itself. If he kicks small animals, 
Swears violently at a servant who mistakes orders, or is 
grossly rude to his wife, it is remarked apologetically that 
these things mean nothing — they are all temper. 

Certainly there is a limit to this form of apology, and the 
forgery of a bill, or the ordering of goods without any pros- 
pect of paying for them, has never been set down to an un- 
fortunate habit of sulkiness or of irascibility. But, on the 
whole, there is a peculiar exercise of indulgence toward 
the manifestations of bad temper which tends to encour- 
age them, so that we are in danger of having among us 
a number of virtuous persons who conduct themselves de- 
testably, just as we have hysterical patients who, with sound 
organs, are apparently laboring under many sorts of organic 
disease. Let it be admitted, however, that a man may be 

a good fellow and yet have a bad temper, so bad that 
we recognize his merits with reluctance, and are inclined to 
resent his occasionally amiable behavior as an unfaii- de- 
mand on our admiration. 

Touchwood is that kind of good fellow. He is by turns 
insolent, quarrelsome, repulsively haughty to innocent 
people who approach him with respect, neglectful of his 
friends, angry in face of legitimate demands, procrastinat- 
ing in the fulfillment of such demands, prompted to rude 
words and harsh looks by a moody disgust with his fellow- 
men in general — and yet, as everybody will assure you, the 
soul of honor, a steadfast friend, a defender of the oppress- 
ed, an afiiectionate-hearted creature. Pity that, after a 
certain experience of his moods, his intimacy becomes in- 
supportable! A man who uses his balmorals to tread on 
your toes with much frequency and an unmistakable em- 
phasis may prove a fast friend in adversity, but meanwhile 
your adversity has not arrived and your toes are tender. 
The daily sneer or growl at your remarks is not to be made 
amends for by a possible eulogy or defense of your under- 
standing against depreciators who may not present them- 
selves, and on an occasion which may never arise. I can 


^ ^ IMPKESSION^S OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 56 

; not submit to a chronic state of blue-and-green bruise as a 
form of insurance against an accident. 

; Touchwood^s bad temper is of the contradicting, pug- 
^ ■ nacious sort. He is the honorable gentleman in opposition, 
whatever proposal or proposition may be broached; and 
when others join him he secretly damns their superfluous 
agreement, quickly discovering that his way of stating the 
case is not exactly theirs. An invitation or any sign of ex- 
pectation throws him into an attitude of refusal. Ask his 
concurrence in a benevolent measure; he will not decline to 
give it, because he has a real sympathy with good aims; 
but he complies resentfully, though where he is let alone 
he will do much more than any one would have thought of 
asking for. No man would shrink with greater sensitive- 
ness from the imputation of not paying his debts, yet when 
a bill is sent in with any promptitude lie is inclined to 
make the tradesman wait for the money he is in such a 
hurry to get. One sees that this antagonistic temper must 
be much relieved by finding a particular object, and that 
its worst moments must be those where the mood is that of 
vague resistance, there being nothing specific to oppose. 
Touchwood is never so little engaging as when he comes 
down to breakfast with a cloud on his brow, after parting 
; from you the night before with an affectionate effusiveness 
i at the end of a confidential conversation which has assured 
\ you of mutual understanding. Impossible that you can 
have committed any offense. If mice have disturbed him, 

. that is not your fault; but, nevertheless, your cheerful 
; greeting had better not convey any reference to the weather, 
i else it will be met by a sneer which, taking you unawares, 
may give you a crushing sense that you make a poor figure 
with your cheerfulness, which was not asked for. Some 
? daring person perhaps introduces another topic, and uses 
the delicate flattery of appealing to Touchwood for his 
^ opinion, the topic being included in his favorite studies. 
- An indistinct muttering, with a look at the carving-knife 

in reply, teaches that daring person how ill he has chosen 
li : a market for his deference. If Touchwood^s behavior af- 
* fects you very closely, you had better break your leg in the 
1 course of the day; his bad temper will then vanish at once; 
{ he will take a painful journey on your behalf; he will sit 
, ' up with you night after night; he will do all the work of 
^ your department, so as to save you from any loss in conse- 


56 


IMPKESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


quence of your accident; he will be even uniformly teftder 
to you till you are well on your legs agaiiu when he will 
some fine morning insult you without provocation, and 
make you wish that his generous goodness to you had not 
closed your lips against retort. 

It is not always necessary that a friend should break his 
leg for Touchwood to feel comiumction and endeavor to 
make amends for his bearishness or insolence. He becomes 
spontaneously conscious that he has misbehaved, and he is 
not only ashamed of himself, but has the better prompting 
to try and heal any wound he has inflicted. Unhappily, 
the habit of being offensive without meaning it leads 
usually to a way of making amends which the injured per- 
son can not but regard as a being amiable without meaning 
it. The kindnesses, the complimentary indications or as- 
surances, are apt to appear in the light of a penance ad- 
justed to the foregoing lapses, and by the very contrast 
they offer call up a keener memory of the wrong they atone 
for. They are not a spontaneous prompting of good-will, 
but an elaborate compensation. And, in fact, Dion^’s 
atoning friendliness has a ring of artificiality. Because he 
formerly disguised his good feeling toward you, he now ex- 
presses more than he quite feels. It is in vain. Having 
made you extremely uncomfortable last week, he has abso- 
lutely diminished his power of making you happy to-day; 
he struggles against this result by excessive effort, but he 
has taught you to observe his fitfulness rather than to be 
Avarmed by his episodic show of regard. 

I suspect that many persons who have an uncertain, in- 
calculable temper hatter themselves that it enhances theii* 
fascination; but perhaps they are under the prior mistake 
of exaggerating the charm which they suppose to be thus 
strengthened; in any case they will do well not to trust in 
the attractions of caprice and moodiness for a long contin- 
uance or for close intercourse. A pretty woman may fan 
the flame of distant adorers by harassing them, but if she 
lets one of them make her his wife, the point of view from 
Avhich he will look at her poutings and tossings and mys- 
terious inability to be pleased will be seriously altered. 
And if slavery to a pretty woman, which seems among the 
least conditional forms of abject service, Avill not bear too 
great a strain from her bad temper, even though her beauty 
remain the same, it is clear that a man whose claims lie in 


IMPRESSTOKS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 57" 

his Jiigh character or high performances had need impress 
us very constantly with his peculiar value and indispen- 
sableness^ if he is to test our patience by an uncertainty of 
temper which leaves us absolutely without grounds for 
guessing how he will receive our persons or humbly ad- 
vanced opinions, or what line he will take on any but the 
most momentous occasions. 

For it is among the repulsive effects of this bad temjDer, 
which is supposed to be compatible with shining virtues, 
that it is apt to determine a man^s sudden adhesion to an 
opinion, whether on a personal or impers(^ial matter, 
without leaving him time to consider his grounds. The ad- 
hesion is sudden and momentary, but it either forms a prec- 
edent for his line of thought and action, or it is presently 
seen to have been inconsistent witli iiis true mind. This 
determination of partisanship by temper has its worst ef- 
fects in the career of the public man, who is always in 
danger of getting so inthr ailed by his own words that he 
looks into facts and questions not to get rectifying knowl- 
edge, but to get evidence that will justify his actual atti- 
tude, which was assumed under an impulse dependent on 
something else than knowledge. There has been plenty of 
insistence on the evil of swearing by the words of a master, 
and having the judgment uniformly controlled by a He 
said it;^^but a much worse woe to befall a man is to have every 
judgment controlled by an I said it — to make a divinity 
of his own short-sightedness, or passion-led aberration, and 
explain the world in its honor. There is hardly a more 
pitiable degradation ^than this for a man of high gifts. 
Hence I can not join with those who wish that Touchwood, 
being young enough to enter on public life, should get 
elected for Parliament, and use his excellent abilities to 
se'rve his country in that conspicuous manner. For hither- 
to, in the less momentous incidents of private life, his ca- 
pricious temper has only produced the minor evil of incon- 
sistency, and he is even greatly at ease in contradicting 
himself, provided he can contradict you, and disappoint 
any smiling expectation you may have shown that the im- 
pressions you are uttering are likely to meet with his sym- 
pathy, considering that the day before he liimself gave you 
the example which your mind is folloAving. He is at least 
free from those fetters of self -justification which are the 
curse of parliamentary speaking; and what I rather desire 


58 IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

for him is that he should proiiuce the great book which he 
is generally pronounced capable of writing, and put his best 
self imperturbably on record for the advantage of society; 
because I should then have steady ground for bearing with 
his diurnal incalculableness, and could fix my gratitude as 
by a strong staple to that unvarying monumental service. 
Unhappily, Touch wood^s great powers have been only so 
far manifested as to be believed in, not demonstrated. 
Everybody rates them highly, and thinks that whatever he 
chose to do would be done in a first-rate manner. Is it his 
love of disappointing complacent expectancy which has 
gone so far as to keep up this lamentable negation, and 
made him resolve not to write the comprehensive work 
which he would have written if nobody had expected it of 
him? 

One can see that if Touchwood were to become a public 
man, and take to frequent speaking on platforms or from 
his seat in the House, it would hardly be possible for .him 
to maintain much integrity of opinion, or to avoid courses 
of partisanship which a healthy public sentiment would 
stamp with discredit. Say that he were endowed with the 
purest honesty, it would inevitably be dragged cajitive by 
this mysterious. Protean bad temper. There would be the 
fatal jmblic necessity of justifying oratorical Temper which 
had got on its legs in its bitter mood and made insulting 
imjiutations, or of keeping up some decent show of consist- 
ency with opinions vented out of Temperas contradictori- 
ness. And words would have to be followed up by acts 
of adhesion. 

Certainly, if a bad-tempered man can be admirably vir- 
tuous, he must be so under extreme difficulties. I doubt 
tlie possibility that a high order of character can coexist 
with a temper like 'Toucliwood^s. For it is of the nature of 
such temper to interrupt the formation of healthy mental 
habits, wliicli depend on a growing harmony between per- 
ception, conviction, and impulse. There may be good feel- 
ings, good deeds — for a human nature may pack endless 
varieties and blessed inconsistencies in its windings — but it 
is essential to what is worthy to be called high character, 
that it may be safely calculated o]i, and that its qualities 
shall have taken the form of principles or laws habitually, 
if not perfectly, obeyed. 

If a man frequently passes unjust judgments, takes u]) 


IMPRESSIOiTS OF THEOPHRASTUS- SUCH. 


59 


false attitudes^ intermits his acts of kindness with rude be- 
havior or cruel words, and falls into the consequent vulgar 
error of supposing that he can make amends by labored 
agreeableness, I can not consider such courses any the less 
ugly because they are ascribed to temper.'’^ Esjoecially I 
object to the assumption that his having a fundamentally 
good disposition is either an apology or a compensation for 
his bad behavior. If his temper yesterday made him lash 
the horses, upset the curricle, and cause a breakage in my 
rib, I feel it no compensation that to-day he vows he will 
drive me anywhere in the gentlest manner any day as long 
as he lives. Yesterday was what it was, my rib is paining 
me, it is not a main object of my life to be driven by 
Touchwood — and I have no confidence in his life-long gen- 
tleness. The utmost form of placability I am caj)able of is 
to try and remember his better deeds already |)erformed, 
ajid, mindful'of niy own offenses, to bear him no malice. 
But I can not accept his amends. 

If the bad-tempered man wants to apologize, he had 
need to do it on a large public scale, make some beneficent 
discovery, produce some stimulating work of genius, invent 
some powerful process — prove himself such a good to con- 
temporary multitudes and future generations, as to make 
the discomfort he causes his friends and acquaintances a 
vanishing quality, a trifie even in their own estimate. 


VII. 

A POLITICAL MOLECULE. 

The most arrant denier n\ust admit that a man often 
furthers larger ends than he is conscious of, and that while 
he is transacting his particular affairs with the narrow jjer- 
tinacity of a respectable ant, he subserves an economy 
larger than any purpose of his own. Society is haj^pily not 
dependent for the growth of fellowship on the small mi- 
nority already endowed with comprehensive sympathy: any 
molecule of the body politic working toward his own inter- 
est in an orderly way gets his understanding more or less 
penetrated with the fact -that his interest is included in 
that of a large number. I have watched several political 
molecules being educated in this way by the nature of things 


()0 IMPRESSIOKS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

into a faint feeling of fraternity. But at this moment I am 
thinking of Sjiike^ an elector who voted on the side of 
Progress^ though he was not inwardly attached to it under 
that name. For abstractions are deities having many spe- 
cific names^ local habitations^ and forms of activity, and 
so get a multitude of devout servants who c^^^re no more for 
them under their highest titles than the celebrated person 
who, putting with forcible brevity a view of human mo- 
tives now much insisted on, asked what Posterity had done 
for him that he should care for Posterity? To many minds 
even among the ancients (thought by some to have been 
invariably poetical), the Goddess of Wisdom was doubtless 
worshiped simply as the patroness of spinning and weav- 
ing. Now spinning and weaving from a maufacturing, 
wholesale point of view, was the chief form under which 
Spike from early years had unconsciously been a devotee 
of Progress. 

He was a political molecule of the most gentlemanlike 
appearance, not less than six feet high, and showing the 
utmost nicety in the care of his person and equipment. His 
umbrella was especially remarkable for its neatness, though 
perhaps he swung it unduly in walking. His complexion 
was fresh, his eyes small, bright, and twinkling. He was 
seen to great advantage in a hat and great-coat — garments 
frequently fatal to the impressiveness of shorter figures; 
but when he was uncovered in the drawing-room, it was 
imjDOssible not to observe that his head shelved off too rapid- 
ly from the eyebrows toward the crown, and that his length 
of limb seemed to have used up his mind so as to cause an 
air of abstraction from conversational topics. He appeared, 
indeed, to be preoccupied with a sense of his exquisite 
cleanliness, clapped his hands together and rubbed them 
frequently, straightened his back, and even ojDened his 
mouth and closed it again with a slight snap, apparently 
for no other purpose than the confirmation to himself of 
his own powers in that line. These are innocent exercises, 
but they are not such as give weight to a man^s personality. 
Sometimes Spike^s mind, emerging from its iDreoccupation, 
burst forth in a remark delivered with smiling zest; as, that 
he did like to see gravel-walks well-rolled, or that a lady 
should always wear the best jewelry, or that a bride was 
a most interesting object; but finding these ideas received 
rather coldly, he would relapse into abstraction, draw up 


IMPKESSIOKS OF THEOPHEASTUS SUCH. 


61 


his back^ wrinkle his brows longitudinally^ and seemed to 
regard society^ even including gravel-walks, jewelry, and 
brides, as essentially a poor affair. Indeed, his ha1)it of 
mind was desponding, and he took melancholy views as to 
the possible extent of human pleasure and the value of ex- 
istence. Especially after he had made his fortune in the 
cotton manufacture, and had thus attained the chief object 
of his ambition — the object Avhich had engaged his talent 
for order and persevering application. For his easy leisure 
caused him much ennui. He was abstemious, and had 
none of those temptations to sensual excess which fill up a 
man^s time, first with indulgence, and then with the proc- 
ess of getting well from its effects. He had not, indeed, 
exhausted the sources of knowledge, but here again his no- 
tions of human pleasure were narrowed by his want of ap- 
petite; for though he seemed rather surprised at the con- 
sideration that Alfred the Great was a Catholic, or that, 
apart from the Ten Commandments, any conception of 
moral conduct had occurred to mankind, he was not stim- 
ulated to further inquiries on these remote matters. Yet 
he aspired to what he regarded as intellectual society, 
willingly entertained beneficed clergymen, and bought the 
books he heard spoken of, arranging them carefully on the 
shelves of what he called his li&ary, and occasionally sit- 
ting alone in the same room with them. 

But some minds seem well glazed by nature against the 
admission of knowledge, and Spike^s was one of them. It was 
not, however, entirely so with regard to politics. He had 
had a strong opinion about the Eeform Bill, and saw clearly 
that the large trading towns ought to send members. Por- 
traits of the Keform heroes hung framed and glazed in his 
library : he prided himself on being a Liberal. In this last par- 
ticular, as well as in not giving benefactions and not making 
loans without interest, he showed unquestionable firmness. 
On the Eepeal of the Corn Laws, again, he was thoroughly 
convinced. His mind was expansive toward foreign mark- 
ets, and his imagination could see that the people from 
whom we took corn might be able to take the cotton goods 
which they had hitherto dispensed with. On his conduct 
in these political concerns, his wife, otherwise influential as 
a woman who belonged to a family with a title in it, and 
who had condescended in marrying him, could gain no hold; 
she had to blush a little at what was called her husband^s 


62 


IMPKESSIONS OF TH EOrilHASTUS SUCH. 


radicalism — an epithet which was a very unfair im- 
peachment of Spike, who never went to the root of any- 
thing. Bnt he understood his own trading affairs, and in 
this way became a genuine, constant political element. If 
he had been born a little later he could have been accepted 
as an eligible member of Parliament, and if he had belonged 
to a high family he might have done for a member of the 
Government. Perhaps his indifference to views ^Mvould 
have passed for administrative judiciousness, and he would 
have been so generally silent that he must often have been 
silent in the right place. But this is empty speculation : 
there is no warrant for saying what Spike would have been 
and known so as to have made a calculable political ele- 
ment, if he had not been educated by having to manage his 
trade. A small mind trained to useful occupation for the 
satisfying of private need becomes a representative of genu- 
ine class-needs. Sinke objected to certain items of legisla- 
tion because they hampered his own trade, but his neigh- 
bora's trade was hampered by the same causes; and though 
he would have been simply selfish in a question of light or 
water between himself and a fellow-townsman, his need for 
a change in legislation, being shared by all his neighbors in 
trade, ceased to be simply selfish, and raised him to a sense 
of common injury and common benefit. True, if the law 
could have been changed for the benefit of his particular 
business, leaving the cotton trade in general in a sorry con- 
dition while he prospered. Spike might not have thought 
that result intolerably unjust; but the nature of things did 
not allow of such a result being contemplated as possible; 
it allowed of an enlarged market for Spike only through 
tlie enlai-gement of his neighbors^ market, and the possi- 
ble is always the ultimate master of our efforts and desires. 
Sipke was obliged to contemj^late a general benefit; and 
thus became public-spirited in spite of himself. Or rather, 
the natui^e of things transmuted his active egoism into a 
demand for a j)ublic benefit. 

You are fond of attributing those fine qualities to Mor- 
dax,^^ said Acer, the other day, ‘^but I have not much be- 
lief in virtues that are always requiring to be asserted, in 
spite of appearances against them. True fairness and good 
will show themselves precisely where his are conspicuously 
absent. I mean in recognizing claims which the rest of the 
world are not likely to stand up for. It does not need 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 63 

much love of truth and justice in me to say that Aldebaran 
is a bright star, or Isaac Newton the greatest of discover- 
ers; nor much kindliness in me to want my notes to be 
heard above the rest in a chorus of hallelujahs to one al- 
ready crowned. It is my way to apply tests. Does the 
man who has the ear of the i)ublic use his advantage ten- 
derly toward poor fellows who may be hindered of their 
due if he treats their pretensions with scorn? That is my 
test of his justice and benevolence.^^ 

My answer was, that his system of moral tests might be 
as delusive as what ignorant people take to be tests of in- 
tellect and learning. If the scholar or savant can not an- 
swer their hap-hazard questions on the shortest notice, their 
belief in his capacity is shaken. But the better informed 
have given up the Johnsonian theory of mind as a j)air of 
legs able to walk east or west according to choice. Intel- 
lect is no longer taken to be a ready-made dose of ability 
to attain eminence (or mediocrity) in all departments; it is 
even admitted that application in one line of study or prac- 
tice has often a laming effect in other directions, and that 
an intellectual quality or special facility which is a f urther- 
. ance in one medium of effort is a drag in another. We 
have convinced ourselves by this time that a man may be 
a sage in celestial physics and a poor creature in the pur- 
chase of seed corn, or even in theorizing about the affec- 
tions; that he may be a mere fumbler in physiology, and 
yet show a keen insight into human motives; that he may 
seem the poor Poll of the company in conversation, and 
yet write with some humorous vigor. It is not true that a 
man^s intellectual power 4s like the strength of a timber 
beam, to be measured by its weakest point. 

Certainly, if Spike had been born a marquis he could not 
have had the same chance of being useful as a political ele- 
ment. But he might have had the same appearance, have 
been equally null in conversation, skeptical as to the reality 
of pleasure, and destitute of historical knowledge; perhaps 
even dimly disliking Jesuitism as a quality in Catholic 
minds, or regarding Bacon as to the inventor of j)hysical 
science. The depths of middle-aged gentlemen^s ignorance 
will never be known, for want of public examinations in 
this branch. 


G4 


IMPRESSIOKS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


VIIL 

THE WATCH-HOG OF KNOWLEDGE. 

Morhax is an admirable man, ardent in intellectual 
work, pnblic-spirited, affectionate, and able to find the 
right words in conveying ingenious ideas or elevated feel- 
ing. Pity that to all these graces he can not add what 
would give them the utmost finish — the occasioiial admis- 
sion that he has been in the wrong, the occasional frank 
Avelcome of a new idea as something not before present to 
his mind! But no: Mordax^s self-respect seems to be of 
that fiery quality which demands that none but the mon- 
archs of thought shall have an advantage over him, and in 
the presence of contradiction or the threat of having his 
notions corrected, he becomes astonishingly unscrupulous 
and cruel for so kindly and conscientious a man. 

Why should we any more apply that fallacious standard 
of what is called consistency to a man^s moral nature, and 
argue against the existence of fine impulses or habits of 
feeling in relation to his actions generally, because those 
better movements are absent in a class of cases which act 
peculiarly on an irritable form of his egoism? The mis- 
take might be corrected by our taking notice that the un- 
generous words or acts which seem to us the most utterly 
incompatible with good dispositions in the offender are those 
which offend ourselves. All otlier persons are able to draw 
a milder conclusion. Laniger, who has a temper but no 
talent for repartee, having been run down in a fierce way 
by Mordax, is inwardly persuaded that the highly lauded 
man is a wolf at heart: he is much tried by perceiving tliat 
his own friends seem to think no worse of the reckless as- 
sailant than they did before; and Oorvus, who has lately 
been flattered by some kindness from Mordax, is unmind- 
ful enough of Laniger^s feeling to dwell on this instance of 
good-nature with admiring gratitude. There is a fable 
tliat when the badger had been stung all over by bees, a bear 
consoled him by a rhapsodic account of how he himself had 
just breakfasted on their honey. The badger replied, 
peevishly, The stings are in my flesh, and the sweetness 


IMPEESSIOKS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. (55 

is on your muzzle. The bear, it is said, was surprised at 
the badger^s want of altruism. 

But this difference of sensibility between Laniger and liis 
friends only mirrors in a faint way the difference between 
his own point of view and that of the man who has injured 
him. If those neutral, perhaps even affectionate persons, 
form no lively conception of what Laniger suffers, how 
should Mordax have any such sympathetic imagination to 
check him in what he persuades himself is a scourging ad- 
ministered by the qualified man to the unqualified? De- 
pend upon it, his conscience, though active enough in some 
gelations, has never given him a twinge because of his 
polemical rudeness and even brutality. He would go from 
the room where he has been tiring himself through the 
watches of the night in lifting and turning a sick friend, 
and straightway write a reply or rejoinder in which he mer- 
cilessly pillored a Laniger who had supposed that he could 
tell the world something else or more than had been sanc- 
tioned by the eminent Mordax — and, what was wor&e, had 
sometimes really done so. Does this nullify the genuine- 
ness of motive which made him tender to his suffering 
friend? Hot at all. It only proves that his arrogant ego- 
ism, set on fire, sends up smoke and flame where just be- 
fore there had been the dews of fellowship and pity. He is 
angry, and equips himself accordingly — with a penknife to 
give the offender a compracliico countenance, a mirror to 
show him the effect, and a pair of nailed boots to give him 
his dismissal. All this to teach him who the Romans 
really were, and to purge Inquiry of incompetent intrusion, 
.so rendering an important service to mankind. 

When a man is in a rage and wants to hurt another in 
consequence, he can always regard himself as the civil arm 
of a spiritual power, and all the more easily because there 
is real need to assert the righteous efficacy of indionation. 
I for my part feel with the Lanigers, and should object all 
the more to their or my being lacerated and dressed with 
salt, if the administrator of such torture alleged as a motive 
his care for Truth and posterity, and got himself pictured 
with a halo in consequence. In transactions between fellow- 
men it is well to consider a little, in the first place, wdiat is 
fair and kind toward the person immediately concerned, 
before we spit and roast him on behalf of the next century 
but one. Wide-reaching motives, blessed and glorious as 


66 


IMPRESSIONS OP THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


they are, and of the highest sacramental virtue, have their 
dangers, like all else that touches the mixed life of the 
earth. They are archangels with awful brow and flaming 
sword, summoning and encouraging us to do the right 
and the divinely heroic, and we feel a beneficent tremor 
in their presence; but to learn what it is they thus summon 
us to do, we have to consider the mortals we are elbowing, 
who are of our own stature and our own appetites. I can 
not feel sure how my voting will affect the condition of 
Central Asia in the coming ages., but I hav^ good reason to 
believe that the future populations there will be none the 
worse off because I abstain from conjectural vilification of 
my opponents during the present parliamentary session, 
and I am very sure that I shall be less injurious to my con- 
temporaries. On the whole, and in the vast majority of 
instances, the actions by which we can do the best for future 
ages is of the sort which has a certain beneficence and grace 
for contemporaries. A sour father may reform prisons, but 
considered in his sourness he does harm. The deed of Judas 
has been attributed to far-reaching views, and the wish to 
hasten his Master^s declaration of himself as the Messiah. 
Perhaps — I will not maintain the contrary — Judas repre- 
sented his motive in this way, and felt justified in his trait- 
orous kiss; but my belief that he deserved, metaphorically 
speaking, to be where T3ante saw him, at the bottom of the 
Malebolge, would not be the less strong because he was not 
convinced that his action was detestable. I refuse to accept 
a man who has the stomach for such treachery, as a hero 
impatient for the redemption of mankind, and for the be- 
ginning of a reign when the kisses shall be those of peace 
and righteousness. 

All this is by the way, to show that my apology for Mor- 
dax was not founded on his persuasion of superiority in his 
own motives, but on the compatibility of unfair, equivocal, 
and evefiu cruel actions with a nature which, apart from 
special temptations, is kindly and generous; and also to en- 
force the need of checks from a fellow-feeling with those 
whom our acts immediately (not distantly) concern. Will 
any one be so hardy as to maintain that an otherwise worthy 
man can not be vain and arrogant? I think most of us 
have some interest in arguing the contrary. And it is of 
the nature of vanity and arrogance, if unchecked, to become 
cruel and self- justifying. There are fierce beasts within : 


IMPKESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 67 

chain them, chain them, and let them learn to cower before 
the creature with wider reason. This is what one wishes 
for Mordax — that his heart and brain should restrain the 
outleap of roar and talons. 

As to his unwillingness to admit that an idea which he 
has not discovered is novel to him, one is surprised that 
quick intellect and shrewd observation do not early gather 
reasons for being ashamed of a mental trick which makes 
one among the comic parts of that various actor. Conceited 
Ignorance. 

I have a sort of valet and factotum, an excellent, re- 
spectable servant, whose spelling is so unvitiated by non- 
phonetic superfluities that he writes night as 7iit, One day, 
looking over his accounts, I said to him, jocosely, You 
are in the latest fashion with your spelling. Pummel; most 
people spell ^ night with a gli between the i and t, but the 
greatest scholars now^ spell it as you do.^^ So I suppose, 
sir,^^ says Pummel; IVe seen it with a gli, but Pve no- 
ways give into that myself. You would never catch Pum- 
mel in an interjection of surprise. I have sometimes laid 
traps for his astonishment, but he has escaped them all, 
either by a respectful neutrality, as of one who would not 
appear to notice that his master had been taking too much 
wine, or else by that strong persuasion of his all-knowing- 
ness whiuh makes it simply impossible for him to feel him- 
self newly informed. If I tell him that the world is spin- 
ning round and along like a top, and that he is spinning 
with it, he says, Yes, I\e heard a deal of that in my 
time, sir,^'’ and lifts the horizontal lines of his brow a little 
higher, balancing his head from side to side as if it were 
too painfully full. Whether I tell him that they cook pup- 
pies in China, that there are ducks with fur coats in Aus- 
tralia, or that in some parts of the world it is the pink of 
politeness to put your tongue out on introduction to a re- 
spectable stranger. Pummel replies, So I suppose, sir,^^ 
with an air of resignation to hearing my poor version of 
well-known things, such as elders use in listening to lively 
boys lately presented with an anecdote-book. His utmost 
concession is, that what you state is what he would have 
supplied if you had given him carte Uanche instead of your 
needless instruction, and in this sense his favorite answer 
is, I should say.^^ 

Pummel/^ I observed^ a little irritated at not getting 


68 IMPRESSIOIS’S OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

my coffee, if you were to carry your kettle and spirits of 
wine up a mountain of a morning, your water would boil 
there sooner/^ I should say, sir/^ Or, there are boil- 
ing springs in Iceland. Better go to Iceland. That^s 
what I"ve been thinking, sir.'’^ 

I have taken to asking him hard questions, and, as I ex- 
j^ected, he never admits his own inability to answer them 
without representing it as common to the human race. 

What is the cause of the tides, Pummel.^^'' Well, sir, 
nobody rightly, knows. Many gives their opinion, but if I 
was to give mine, it ^ud be different. 

But while he is never surprised himself, he is constantly 
imagining situations of surprise for others. His own con- 
sciousness is that of one so thoroughly soaked in knowledge 
that further absorption is impossible, but his neighbors ap- 
pear to him to be in the state of thirsty sponges which it is 
a charity to besprinkle. His great interest in thinking of 
foreigners is that they must be surprised at what they see 
in England, and especially at the beef. He is often occu- 
pied with the surprise Adam must have felt at the sight of 
the assembled animals — for he was not like us, sir, used 
from a b^’y to WombwelBs shows. He is fond of discours- 
ing to the lad who acts as shoeblack and general subaltern, 
and I have overheard him saying to that small upstart, 
with some severity, Now don^t you pretend to know, be- 
cause the more you pretend, the more I see your ignirance 
— a lucidity on his part which has confirmed my impression 
that the thoroughly self-satisfied person is the only one 
fully to appreciate the charm of humility in others. 

Your diffident self -suspecting mortal is not very angry 
that others should feel more comfortable about themselves, 
provided that they are not otherwise offensive: he is rather 
like the chilly person, glad to sit next a warmer neiglibor; 
or the timid, glad to have a courageous fellow-traveler. It 
cheers him to observe the store of small comforts that his 
fellow-creatures may find in their self-complacency, just as 
one is pleased to see poor old souls soothed by the tobacco 
and snuff for which one has neither nose nor stomach one^s 
self. 

But your arrogant man will not tolerate a presumption 
which he sees to be ill-founded. The service he regards 
society as most in need of is to put down the conceit which is 
SO particularly rife around him that he is inclined to believe 


IMPKESSIONS OF THEOPHKASTUS SUCH. 


69 


it the growing characteristic of the present age. In the 
schools of Magna Graecia^ or in the sixth century of our era, 
or even under Kublai Khan, he finds a comparative freedom 
from that presumption by which his contemporaries are 
stirring his able gall. The way people will now flaunt 
notions which are not his, without appearing to mind that 
they are not his, strikes him as especially disgusting. It 
might seem surprising to us that one strongly convinced of 
his own value should prefer to exalt an age in which he did 
not flourish, if it were not for the reflection that the present 
age is the only one in which anybody has appeared to under- 
value him. 


IX. 

A HALF-BKEEH. 

Ah early deep-seated love to which we become faithless 
has its unfailing Nemesis, if only in that division of soul 
which narrows all newer joys by the intrusion of regret and 
the established presentiment of change. I refer not merely 
to the love of a person, but to the love of ideas, practical 
beliefs, and social habits. And faithlessness here means 
not a gradual conversion dependent on enlarged knowledge, 
but a yielding to seductive circumstance; not a conviction 
that the original choice was a mistake, but a subjection to 
incidents that flatter a growing desire. In this sort of love 
it is the forsaker who has the melancholy lot; for an aban- 
doned belief may be more etfectively vengeful than Dido. 
The child of a wandering tribe, caught young and trained ^ 
to polite life, if he feels a hereditary yearning, can run 
away to the old wilds and get his nature into tune. But 
there is no such recovery possible to the man who remem- 
bers what he once believed without being convinced that he 
was in error, who feels within him unsatisfied stirrings 
toward old beloved habits and intimacies from which he has 
far receded without conscious justification or unwavering 
sense of superior attractiveness in the new. This involun- 
tary renegade has his character hopelessly jangled and out 
of tune. He is like an organ with its stops in the lawless 
condition of obtruding themselves without method, so that 
hearers are amazed by the most unexpected transitions — 


70 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH*. 


the trumpet breaking in on the flute, and the oboe con- 
founding both. 

Hence the lot of Mixtus affects me pathetically, notwith- 
standing that he spends his growing wealtli with liberality 
and manifest enjoyment. To most observers he appears to 
be simply one of the fortunate and also sharp commercial 
men who began with meaning to be rich and have become 
what they meant to be: a man never taken to be well-born, 
but surprisingly better informed than the well-born usually 
are, and distinguished among ordinary commercial mag- 
nates by a personal kindness which prompts him not only 
to help the suffering in a material way through his wealth, 
but also by direct ministration of his own; yet with all this 
diffusing, as it were, the odor of a man delightedly con- 
scious of his wealth as an equivalent for the other social 
distinctions of rank and intellect which he can thus ad- 
mire without envying. Hardly one among those superfi- 
cial observers can suspect that he aims, or has ever aimed, 
at being a waiter; still less can they imagine that his mind 
is often moved by strong currents of regret and of the most 
unworldly sympathies from the memories of a youthful 
time when his chosen associates were men and women whose 
only distinction was a religious, a philanthropic, or an in- 
tellectual enthusiasm, when the lady on whose words his 
attention most hung was a writer of minor religious litera- 
ture, when he was a visitor and exhorter of the poor in the 
alleys of a great provincial town, and when he attended the 
lectures given specially to young men by Mr. Apollos, the 
eloquent congregational preacher, who had studied in Ger- 
many, and had liberal advanced views then far beyond the 
ordinary teaching of his sect. At that time Mixtus thought 
himself a young man of socially reforming ideas, of re- 
ligious principles and religious yearnings. It was within 
his prospects also to be rich, but he looked forwaixi to a 
use of his riches chiefly for reforming and religious pur- 
poses. His opinions were of a strongly democratic stamp, 
except that even then, belonging to the class of employers, 
he was oi^posed to all demands in the employed that would 
restrict the expansiveness of trade. He was the most demo- 
cratic in relation to the unreasonable privileges of the aris- 
tocracy and landed interest; and he had also a religious 
sense of brotherhood with the poor. Altogether, he was a 
sincerely benevolent young man, interested in ideas, and 


IMPRESSIOKS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 71 

renouncing personal ease for tlie sake of study/ religious 
communion, and good works. If you had known him then, 
you would have expected him to marry a highly serious and 
perhaps literary woman, sharing his benevolent and re- 
ligious habits, and likely to encourage his studies — a woman 
who along with himself would play a distinguished part in 
one of the most enlightened religious circles of a great pro- 
vincial capital. 

How is it that Mixtus finds himself in a London mansion, 
and in society totally unlike that which made the ideal of 
his younger years? And whom did he marry? 

Why, he married Scintilla, who fascinated him as she 
had fascinated others, by her preltiness, her liveliness, and 
her music. It is a common enougK case, that of a man 
being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite 
of his ideal; or if not wholly captivated, at least effectively 
captured by a combination of circumstances along with an 
unwarily manifested inclination which might otherwise have 
been transient. Mixtus was captivated and then captured 
on the worldly side of his disposition, which had been 
always growing and flourishing side by side with his philan- 
thropic and religious tastes. He had ability in business, 
and he had early meant to be rich; also, he was getting 
rich, and the taste for such success was naturally growing 
with the pleasure of rewarded exertion. It was during a 
business sojourn in London that he met Scintilla, who, 
though without fortune, associated with families of Greek 
merchants living in a style of splendor, and with artists 
patronized by such wealthy entertainers. Mixtus on this 
occasion became familiar with a world in which wealth 
seemed the key to a more brilliant sort of dominance than 
that of a religious patron in the provincial circles of X. 
Would it not be possible to unite the two kinds of sway? A 
man bent on the most useful ends might, a fortune 
large enough^ make morality magnificent, and recommend 
religious principle by showing it in combination with the 
best kind of house and the most liberal of tables; also, with 
a wife whose graces, wit, and accomplishments gave a finish 
sometimes lacking even to establishments got up with that 
unhesitating worldliness to which high cost is a sufficient 
reason. Enough. 

Mixtus married Scintilla. Now this lively lady knew 
nothing of Nonconformists, except that they were un- 


72 IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

fashionable: she did not distinguish one conventicle from 
another, and Mr. Apollos, with his enlightened interpreta- 
tions, seemed to her as heavy a bore, if not quite so ridic- 
ulous, as Mr. Johns could have been with his solemn twang 
at the Baptist chapel in the lowest suburbs, or as a local 
preacher among the Methodists. In general, people who 
appeared seriously to believe in any sort of doctrine, whether 
religious, social, or philosophical, seemed rather absurd to 
Scintilla. Ten to one these theoretic people pronounceil 
oddly, had some reason or other for saying* that the most 
agreeable things were wrong, wore objectionable clothes, 
and wanted you to subscribe to something. They were prob- 
ably ignorant of arl and music, did not understand badi- 
nage, and, in fact, could talk of nothing amusing. In 
Scintilla^s eyes the majority of persons were ridiculous, and 
deplorably wanting in that keen perception of what was 
good taste, with which she herself was blessed by nature and 
education; but the people understood to be religious or 
othei*wise theoretic were the most ridiculous of all, without 
being proportionately amusing and inevitable. 

Did Mixtus not discover this view of Scintilla^s before 
their marriage? Or did he allow her to remain in ignorance 
of habits and opinions which had made half the occupation 
of his youth? 

When a man is inclined to marry a particular woman, 
and has made any committal of himself, this woman^s opin- 
ions, however different from his own, are readily regarded 
as part of her pretty ways, especially if they are merely 
negative; as, for example, that she does not insist on the 
Trinity or on the rightfulness or expediency of church 
rates, but simply regards her lover^s troubling himself in 
disputation on these heads as stuff and nonsense, The 
man feels his own superior strength, and is sure that mar- 
riage will make no difference to him on the subjects about 
which he is in earnest. And to laugh at men^s affairs is a 
woman^s privilege, tending do enliven the domestic hearth. 
If Scintilla had no liking for the best sort of Noncon- 
formity, she was without any troublesome bias toward 
Episcopacy, Anglicanism, and early sacraments, and was 
quite contented not to go to church. 

As to Scintilla^s acquaintance with her lover’s tastes on 
these subjects, she was equally convince:!, on her side, that 
a husband’s queer ways while he was a bachelor would ht* 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 73 

easily laughed out of him when he had married an adroit 
woman. Mixtus, she felt, was an excellent' creature, quite 
likable, who was getting rich; and Scintilla meant to have 
all the advantages of a rich man^s wife. She was not in 
the least a wicked woman; she was simply a pretty animal 
of the "ape kind, with an aptitude for certain accomplish- 
ments which education had made the most of. 

But we have seen what has been the result to poor Mix- 
tus. He has become richer even than he dreamed of being, 
has a little palace in London, and entertains with splendor 
the half aristocratic, professional, and artistic society which 
he is proud to think select. This society regards him as a 
clever fellow ih his particular branch, seeing that he has 
become a considerable capitalist, and as a man desirable to 
have - on the list of one^s acquaintance. But from every 
other- point of view Mixtus finds himself personally sub- 
merged: what he happens to think is not felt by his es- 
teemed guests to be of any consequence, and what he used 
to think with the ardor of conviction he now hardly ever 
expresses. He is transplanted, and the sap witliin him has 
long been diverted into other than the old lines of vigorous 
growth. How could he speak to the artist Crespi or to Sir 
Hong Kong Bantam about the enlarged doctrine of Mr. 
Apollos? How could he mention to them his former ef- 
forts toward evangelizing the inhabitants of the X. alleys? 
And his references to his historical and geographical studies 
toward a survey of possible markets for English products 
are received with an air of ironical suspicion % many of his 
political friends, who take his pretension to give advice 
concerning the Amazon, the Euphrates, and the Niger as 
equivalent to the currier^s wide views on the applicability 
of leather. He can only make a figure through his genial 
hospitality. It is in vain that he buys the best pictures 
and statues of the best artists. Nobody will call him a 
Judge in art. If his pictures and statues are well chosen, 
it is generally thought that Scintilla told him what to buy; 
and yet Scintilla, in other connections, is spoken of as 
having only a superficial and often questionable taste. 

Mixtus, it is decided, is a good fellow, not ignorant — no, 
really having a good deal of knowledge as well as sense, but 
not easy to classify otherwise than as a rich man. He has con- 
sequently become a little uncertain as to his owii point of 
view, and in his most unreserved moments of friendly in- 


74 


IMPRESSIOKS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


tercourse, even when speaking to listeners whom he thinks 
likely to sympathize with the earlier part of his career, he 
presents himself in all his various aspects, and feels him- 
self in turn what he has been, what he is, and what others 
take him to be (for this last status is what we must 
all more or less accept). He will recover with some glow 
of enthusiasm the vision of his old associates, the particular 
limit he was once accustomed to trace of freedom in re- 
ligious speculation, and his old ideal of a worthy life; but 
he will presently pass to the argument that money is the 
only means by which you can get what is best worth hav- 
ing in the world, and will arrive at the exclamation, ^^Give 
me money with the tone and gesture of a man who both 
feels and knows. Then, if one of his audience, not hav- 
ing money, remarks that a man may have made up his 
mind to do without money because he prefers something 
else, Mixtus is with him immediately, cordially concurring 
in the supreme value of mind and genius, which, indeed, 
make his own chief delight, in that he is able to entertain 
the admirable possessors of these attributes at his own 
table, though not himself reckoned among them. Yet, 
he will proceed to observe, there was a time when he 
sacrificed his sleep to study, and even now, amidst the 
press of business, he from time to time thinks of taking 
up the manuscripts which he hopes some day to com- 
plete, and is always increasing his collection of valuable 
works bearing on his favorite topics. And it is true that 
he has read much in certain directions, and can remem- • 
her what he has read; he knows the history and theories 
of colonization, and the social condition of countries that 
do not at present consume a sufficiently large share 
of our products and manufactures. He continues his 
early habit of regarding the spread of Christianity as a 
great result of our commercial intercourse with black, 
brown, and yellow populations; but this is an idea not 
spoken of in the sort of fashionable society that Scintilla 
collects round her husband^s table, and Mixtus now phi- 
losophically reflects that the cause must come before the 
effect, and that the thing to be directly striven for is the 
commercial intercourse, not excluding a little war if that 
also should prove needful as a pioneer of Christianity. 
He has long been wont to feel bashful about his former 
religion; as if it were an old attachment having conse- 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 75 

qnences which he did not abandon but kept in decent 
privacy, his avowed object and actual position being in- 
compatable with their public acknowledgment. 

There is the same kind of fluctuation in his aspect to- 
ward social questions and dutiek He has not lost the 
kindness thait used to make him a benefactor and succorer 
of the needy, and he is still liberal in helping forward the 
clever and industrious; but in his active superintendence of 
commercial undertakings he has contracted more and more 
of the bitterness which capitalists and- employers often feel 
to be a reasonable mood toward obstructive proletaries. 
Hence many who have occasionally met him when trade 
questions were being discussed, conclude him to be indis- 
tinguishable from the ordinary run of moneyed and money 
getting men. Indeed, hardly any of his ^acquaintances 
know what Mixtus really is, considered as a whole — nor 
does Mixtus himself know it. 


X. 

DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY. 

ne faut pas mettre un ridicule oil il n^y en a point: 
c^est se gdter le gout, c^est corrompre son jugement et celui 
des autres. Mais le ridicule qui est quelque part, il faut 
Ty voir, Tentirer avec grace et d’une maniere qui plaise et 
qui instruise.^^ 

I am fond of quoting this passage from La Bruyere, be- 
cause the subject is one where I like to show a Frenchman 
on my side, to save my sentiments from being set down to 
my peculiar dullness and deficient sense of the ludicrous, 
and also that they may profit by that enchantment of ideas 
when presented in a foreign tongue, that glamour of un- 
familiarity conferring a dignity on the foreign names of 
very common things, of which even a philosopher like 
Dugald Stewart confesses the influence. I remember hear- 
ing a fervid woman attempt to recite in English the narra- 
tive of a begging Frenchman who described the violent 
death of his father in the July days. The narrative had 
impressed her, through the mists of her flushed anxiety to 
understand it, as something quite grandly pathetic; but 
finding the facts turn out meager, and her audience cold, 
she broke ofi, saying, ^ ^ It sounded so much finer in French 


7G 


IMPKESSIOliq^S OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


— fai vu le sang de mon pere, and so on — I wish I could 
repeat it in French/^ This was a pardonable illusion in an 
old-fashioned lady who had not received the polyglot edu- 
cation of the present day; but I observe that even now 
much nonsense and bad taste win admiring acceptance 
solely by virtue of the French language, and one may fairly 
desire that what seems a just discrimination should profit 
by the fashionable prejudice in favor of La Bruyere^s idiom. 
But I wish he had added that the habit of dragging the lu- 
dicrous into topics where the chief interest is of a different 
or even opposite kind is a sign not of endowment, but of de- 
ficiency. 

The aid; of spoiling is within reach of the dullest faculty; 
the coarsest clown with a hammer in his hand might chip 
the nose off every statue and bust in the V atican, and stand 
grinning at the effect of his work. Because wit is an ex- 
quisite product of high powers, we are not therefore forced 
to admit the sadly confused inference of the monotonous 
jester that he is establishing his superiority over every less 
facetious person, and over every topic on which he is igno- 
rant or insensible, by being uneasy until he has distorted 
it in the small cracked mirror which he carries about with 
him as a joking apparatus. Some high authority is needed 
to give many worthy and timid persons the freedom of 
muscular repose under the growing demand on them to 
laugh when they have no other reason than the peril of be- 
ing taken for dullards; still more to inspire them with the 
courage to say that they object to theatrical spoiling for 
themselves and their children of all affecting themes, all the 
grander deeds and aims of men, by burlesque associations 
adapted to the taste of rich fish-mongers in the stalls and 
their assistants in the gallery. The English people in the 
present generation are falsely reputed to know Shakespeare 
(as, by some innocent persons, the Florentine mule-drivers 
are believed to have known the Divina Commedia,^^ not, 
perhaps, excluding all the subtle discourses in the Purgato- 
rio and Paradiso ; but there seems a clear prospect that 
in the coming generation he will be known to them through 
burlesques, and that his plays will find a new life as panto- 
mimes. A bottle-nosed Lear will come on with a mon- 
strous corpulence, from which he will frantically dance him- 
self free during the mid-night storm; Eosalind and Celia 
will join in a grotesque ballet with shepherds and shepherd- 


IMPRESSIONS OP THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 77 

esses; Ophelia in fleshings and a volnminons brevity of 
grenadine will dance through the mad scene, finishing with 
the famous attitude of the scissors in the arms of Laer- 
tes; and all the speeches in Hamlet will be so ingenious- 
ly parodied that the originals will be reduced to a mere 
memoria teclinica of the improver^’s puns — premonitory 
signs of a hideous millennium, in which the lion will have 
to lie down with the lascivious monkeys whom (if we may 
trust Pliny) his soul naturally abhors. 

I have been amazed to find that some artists, whose own 
works have the ideal stamp, are quite insensible to the 
damaging tendency of the burlesquing spirit which ranges 
to and fro and up and down on the earth, seeing no reason 
(except a precarious censorship) why it should not appro- 
priate every sacred, heroic, and pathetic theme w^hich serves 
to make up the treasure of human admiration, hope, and 
love. One would have thought that their own half -despair- 
ing efforts to invest in worthy outward shape^the vague in- 
ward impressions of sublimity, and the consciousness of an 
implicit ideal in the commonest scenes, might have made 
them susceptible of some disgust or alarm at the species of 
burlesque which is likely to render their compositions no 
better than a dissolving view, where every noble form is 
seen melting into its preposterous caricature. It used to 
be imagined of thb unhappy mediaeval Jews that they paro- 
died Calvary by crucifying dogs; if they had been guilty, 
they would at least have had the excuse of the hatred and 
rage begotten by persecution. Are we on the way to a 
parody which shall have no other excuse than the reckless 
search after fodder for degraded appetites — after the pay 
to be earned by pasturing Circe^s herd where they may de- 
file every monument of that growing life which should have 
kept them human? 

The world seems to me well supplied with what is genu- 
inely ridiculous: wit and humor may play as harmlessly or 
beneficently round the changing facets of egoism, absurd- 
ity, and vice, as the sunshine over the rippling sea or the 
dewy meadows. Why should we make our delicious sense 
of the ludicrous, with its invigorating shocks of laughter 
and its irrepressible smiles, which are the outglow of an in- 
ward radiation as gentle and cheering as the warmth of 
morning, flourish like a brigand on the robbery of our 
mental wealth? — or let it take its exercise as a madman 


78 IMPRESSIONS OE THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

mighty if allowed a free niglitly promenade, by drawing the 
populace with bonfires which leave some venerable structure 
a blackened ruin, or send a scorching smoke across the 
portraits of the past, at which we once looked with a loving 
recognition of fellowship, and disfigure them into butts of 
mockery? — nay, worse — use it to degrade the healthy appe- 
tites and affections of our nature as they are seen to be de- 
graded in insane patients, whose system, all out of joint, 
finds matter for screaming laughter in mere topsy-turvy, 
makes every passion preposterous or obscene, and turns the 
hard-won order of life into a second chaos, hideous enough 
to make one wail that the first was ever thrilled with light? 

This is what I call debasing the moral currency; lower- 
ing the value of every inspiring fact and tradition so that it 
will command less and less of the spiritual products, the 
generous motives which sustain the charm and elevation of 
our social existence — the something besides bread by which 
man saves his soul alive. The bread-winner of the family 
may demand Tnore and more coppery shillings, or assignats, 
or greenbacks for his day^s work, and so get the needful 
quantum of food; but let that moral currency be emptied 
of its value — let a greedy buffoonery debase all historic 
beauty, majesty, and pathos, and the more you heap up the 
desecrated symbols the greater will be the lack of the en- 
nobling emotions which subdue the tyranny of suffering, 
and make ambition one with social virtue. 

And yet, it seems, parents will put into the hands of their 
children ridiculous parodies (perhaps with more ridiculous 
^‘'illustrations of the poems which stirred their own ten- 
derness or filial piety, and carry them to make their first 
acquaintance with great men, great works, or solemn crises 
through the medium of some miscellaneous burlesque which, 
with its idiotic puns and farcical attitudes, will remain 
among their primary associations, and reduce them through- 
.out their time of studious preparation for life to the moral 
imbecility of an inward giggle at what might have stimu- 
lated their high emulation, or fed the fountains of compas- 
sion, trust, and constancy. One wonders where these 
parents have deposited that stock of morally educating 
stimuli which is to be independent of poetic tradition, and 
to subsist in spite of the finest images being degraded and 
the finest words of genius being poisoned as with some be- 
fooling drug. 


IMPKESSIOKS OF THEOPHll'ASTUS SUCH. 79 

Will fine wit^ will exquisite humor prosper the more 
through this turning of all things indiscriminately into food 
for a gluttbnous laughter, an idle craving without sense of 
flavors? On the contrary. That defeghtful power which 
La Bruyere points to — ^^le ridicule qui est quelque part, 
il fmt Ty voir. Fen tirer avec grace et d^une maniere qui 
plaise et qui instruise — depends on a discrimination only 
compatible with the varied sensibilities which give sym- 
pathetic insight, and with the justice of perception which is 
another name for grave knowledge. Such a result is no 
more to be expected from faculties on the strain to And 
some small hook by which they may attach the lowest in- 
congruity to the most momentous subject, than it is to be 
expected of a sharper, watching for gulls in a great politi- 
cal assemblage, that he will notice the blundering logic of 
partisan speakers; or season his observation with the salt of 
historical parallels. But after all our psychological teach- 
ing, and in the midst of our zeal for education, we are still, 
most of us, at the stage of believing that mental powers 
and habita have somehow, not perhaps in the general state- 
ment, but in any particular case, a kind of spiritual glaze 
against conditions which we are continually applying to 
them. We soak our children in habits of contempt and 
exultant gibing, and yet are confident that — as Clarissa one 
day said to me — We can always teach them to be rever- 
ent in the right place, you know."^^ And doubtless if she 
were to make her boys to see a burlesque Socrates, with 
swollen legs, dying in the utterance of cockney puns, and 
were to hang up a sketch of this comic scene among their 
bedroom prints, she would think this preparation not at 
all to the prejudice of their emotions on hearing tlieir tutor 
read that narrative of the Apology which has been con- 
secrated by the reverent gratitude of ages. This is the im- 
poverishment that threatens our posterity: a new Famine, 
a meager fiend with lewd grin and clumsy hoof, is breath- 
ing a moral mildew over the harvest of our human senti- 
ments. These are the most delicate elements of our too 
easily perishable civilization. And here again I like to 
quote a Fi'ench testimony. Sainte Beuve, referring to a 
time of insurrectionary disturbance, says, ‘'^Eien de plus 
prompt a baisser que la civilisation dans les crises comme 
celle-ci; on perd en trois semaines le resultat de plusieurs 
si^cles. La civilisation, la vie est une chose apprise et in- 


80 


IMPKESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


ventee, qu^on le sache bien: ^ Inventas aut qui vifam ex- 
coliiere per artes,^ Les liommes apr^S" quelqiies aimSes de 
paix oublient trop cette verite : ils arrivent a croire que la 
ciiUtire est chose iniiee, qu^elle est la nieme chose que la 
nature. La sauvagerie est ton jours la a deux pas, et, des 
qu^oii lache pied, elle recommence. 

We have been severely enough taught (if we were willing 
to learn) that our civilization, considered as a splendid 
material fabric, is helplessly in peril without the spiritual 
police of sentiments or ideal feelings. And it is this invisi- 
ble police which we had need, as a community, strive to 
maintain in efficient force. How if a dangerous Swing 
were sometimes disguised in a versatile entertainer devoted 
to the amusement of mixed audiences? And I confess that 
sometimes, when I see a certain style of young lady, who 
checks our tender admiration with rouge and henna and at 
the blazonry of an extravagant expenditure, with slang and 
bold hrusquerie intended to signify her emancipated view 
of things, and with cynical mockery which she mistakes for 
penetration, I am sorely tempted to hiss out Petroleuse P’ 
It is a small matter to have our palaces set aflame com- 
liared with the misery of having our sense of r. noble 
womanhood, which is the inspiration of a purifying shame, 
the promise of life-penetrating affection, stained and blotted 
out by images of repulsiveness. These things come — not 
of higher education, but — of dull ignorance fostered into 
pertness by the greedy vulgarity which reverses Peter^s vis- 
ionary lesson, and learns to call all things common and 
unclean. It conies of debashig tlie moral currency. 

The Tirynthians, according to an ancient story reported 
by Athenaeus, becoming conscious that their trick of laugh- 
ter at everything and nothing was making them unfit for 
the conduct of serious affairs, appealed to the Delphic 
oracle for some means of cure. The god prescribed a pe- 
culiar form of sacrifice, which would be effective if they 
could carry it through without laughing. They did their 
best; but the flimsy joke of a boy upset their unaccustomed 
gravity, and in this way the oracle taught them that even 
the gods could not prescribe a quick cure for a long vitia- 
tion, or give power and dignity to a people who in a crisis 
of the public well-doing were at the mercy of a poor jest. 


IMPKESSTOi^S OF THEOPHKASTUS SUCH. 


81 


XL 

THE WASP CKEDITED WITH THE HOHEYCOMB. 

No man, I imagine, would object more strongly than 
Euphorion to communistic principles in relation to material 
property, but with regard to property in ideas he entertains 
such principles willingly, and is disposed to treat the dis- 
tinction between Mine and Thine in original authorship as 
egoistic, narrowing, and low. I have known him, indeed, 
insist at some expense of erudition on the prior right of an 
ancient, a mediaeval, or an eighteenth-century writer to be 
credited with a view or statement lately advanced with 
some show of originality; and this championship seems to 
imply a nicety of conscience toAvard the dead. He is evi- 
dently unwilling that his neighbors should get more credit 
than is due to them, and in this way he appears to recog- 
nize a certain proprietorship even in spiritual production. 
But perhaj)S it is no real inconsistency that, with regard to 
many instances of modern origination, it is his habit to talk 
with a Gallic largeness and refer to the universe: he ex- 
patiates on the diffusive nature of intellectual products, free 
and all-embracing as the liberal air; on the infinitesimal 
smallness of individual origination compared with the mass- 
ive inheritance of thought on which every new generation 
enters; on that growing preparation for every epoch through 
which certain ideas or modes of vieAV are said to be in tlie 
air, and, still more metaphorically speaking, to be inevit- 
ably absorbed, so that every one may be excused for not 
knowing how he got them. Above all, he insists on the 
projier subordination of the irritable self, the mere vehicle 
of an idea or combination which, being produced by the 
sum total of the human race, must belong to that multiple 
entity, from the accomplished lecturer or popularizer who 
transmits it, to the remotest generation of Puegians or Hot- 
tentots, however indifferent these may be to the superiority of 
their right above that of the eminently perishable dyspeptic 
author. 

One may admit that such considerations carry a profound 
truth to be even religiously contemplated, and yet object 
all the more to the mode in which Euphorion seems to ap- 


82 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


ply them. I protest against tlie use of these majestic con- 
ceptions to do the dirty work of unscrupulosity, and justify 
tlie non-payment of conscious debts which can not be de- 
fined or enforced by the law. Especially since it is observa- 
ble that the large views as to intellectual property which 
can apparently reconcile an able person to the use of lately 
borrowed ideas as if they were his own, when this spolia- 
tion is favored by the public darkness, never hinder him 
from joining, in the zealous tribute of recognition and ap- 
plause to those warriors of Truth whose triumphal arches 
are seen in the public ways, those conquerors whose battles 
and annexations^^ even the carpenters and bricklayers 
know by name. Surely the acknowledgment of a mental 
debt which will not be immediately detected and may never 
be asserted, is a case to which the traditional susceptibility 
to debts of honor would be suitably transferred. There 
is no massive public opinion that can be expected toi;ell on 
these relations of thinkers and investigators — relations to be 
thoroughly understood and felt only by those who are in- 
terested in the life of ideas and acquainted with their his- 
tory. To lay false claim to an invention or discovery which 
has an immediate market value; to vamp up a professedly 
new book of reference by stealing from the pages of one al- 
ready produced at the cost of much labor and material; to 
copy sombody else^s poem and send the manuscript to a 
magazine, or hand it about among friends as an original 

effusion to deliver an elegant extract from a known 
writer as a piece of improvised eloquence — these are the 
limits within which the dishonest pretence of originality is 
likely to get hissed or hooted, and bring more or less shame 
on the culprit. 

It is not necessary to understand the merit of a per- 
formance, or even to spell with any comfortable confidence, 
in order to perceive at once that such pretenses are not re- 
spectable But the difference between these vulgar frauds, 
these devices of ridiculous jays whose ill-secured plumes are 
seen falling off them as they run, and the quiet approjiria- 
tion of other people^s philosophic or scientific ideas, can 
hardly be held to lie in their moral quality, unless we take 
impunity as our criterion. The pitiable jays had no pre- 
sumption in their favor, and foolishly fronted an alert in- 
credulity; but Euphorion, the accomplished theorist, has 
an audience who exjiect much of him, and take it as the 


lMPlli:SSIOKS OF THFOPHKASTtJS SUCH. 83 

most natural thing in the world that every unusual view 
which he presents anonymously should be due solely to his 
ingenuity. His borrowings are no incongruous feathers awk- 
wardly stuck on; they have an appropriateness which makes 
them seem an answer to anticipation, like the return phrases 
of a melody. Certainly one can not help the ignorant con- 
clusions of polite society, and there are, perhaps, fashion- 
able persons who, if a speaker has occasion to explain what 
the occiput is, will consider that he has lately discovered 
that curiously-named portion of the animal frame; one can 
not give a genealogical introduction to every long-stored 
item of fact or conjecture that may happen to be a revela- 
tion for the large class of persons who are understood to 
judge soundly on a small basis of knowledge. But Eupho- 
rion would be very sorry to have it supposed that he is un- 
acquainted with the history of ideas, and sometimes carries 
even into minutiae the evidence of his exact registration of 
names in connection with quotable phrases or suggestions: 
I can therefore only explain the apparent infirmity of his 
memory in cases of larger conveyance by supposing that 
he is accustomed by the very association of largeness to 
range them at once under those grand laws of the universe 
in the light of which Mine and Thine disappear, and are re- 
solved into Everybody's or Nobody^s, and one man^s par- 
ticular obligations to another melt untraceably into the ob- 
ligations of the earth to the solar system in general. 

Euphorion himself, if a particular omission of acknowl- 
edgment were brought home to feim, would probably take 
a narrower ground of explanation. It was a lapse of mem- 
ory; or it did not occur to him as necessary in this case to 
mention a name, the source being well known — or (since 
this seems usually to act as a strong reason for mention) he 
rather abstained from adducing the name because it might 
injure the excellent matter advanced, just as an obscure 
trade-mark casts discredit on a good commodity, and even 
on the retailer who has furnished himself from a quarter 
not likely to be esteemed first-rate. No doubt this last is 
a genuine and frequent reason for the non-acknowledgment 
of indebtedness to what one may call impersonal as well as 
personal sources: even an American editor of school classics 
whose own English could not pass for more than a syntacti- 
cal shoddy of the cheapest sort, felt it unfavorable to his 
reputation for sound learning that he should be obliged to 


84 


IMPRESSIONS OP THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


the Penny Cyclopaedia, and disguised his references to it 
under contractions in which Us, Knoivl, took the place of 
the low word Penny, W orks of this convenient stamp, 
easily obtained and well nourished with matter, are felt to 
be like rich but unfashionable relations who are visited and 
received in privacy, and whose capital is used or inherited 
without any ostentatious insistance on their names and 
places of abode. As to memory, it is known that this frail 
faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering 
to our self-love — when it does not retain them carefully as 
subjects not to be approached, marshy spots with a warning- 
flag over them. But it is always interesting to bring for- 
ward eminent names, such as Patricius or Scaliger, Euler 
or Lagrange, Bopp or Humboldt. To know exactly what 
has been drawn from them is erudition, and heightens our 
own influence, which seems advantageous to mankind; 
whereas to cite an author whose ideas may pass as higher 
currency under our own signature can have no object except 
the contradictory one of throwing the illumination over his 
figure when it is important to be seen one^s self. All these 
reasons must weigh considerably with those speculative per- 
sons who have to ask themselves whether or not Universal 
Utilitarianism requires that in the particular instance be- 
fore them they should injure a man who has been of service 
to them, and rob a fellow- workman of the credit which is 
due to him. 

After all, however, it must be admitted that hardly any 
accusation is more difficult to prove, and more liable to be 
false, than that of a plagiarism which is the conscious theft 
of ideas and deliberate reproduction of them as original. 
The arguments on the side of acquittal are obvious and 
strong — the inevitable coincidences of contemporary think- 
ing; and our continual experience of finding notions turning 
up in our minds without any label on them to tell us whence 
they came; soThat, if we are in the habit of expecting much 
from our own capacity, we accept them at once as a new 
inspiration. Then, in relation to the elder authors, there 
is the difficulty, first of learning, and then of remembering 
exactly what has been wrought into the backward tapestry 
of the workPs history, together with the fact that ideas ac- 
quired long ago reappear as the sequence of an awakened 
interest or a line of inquiry which is really new in us, whence 
it is conceivable that if we were ancients, some of us might 


IMPRESSIOiTS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 85 

be offering grateful hecatombs by mistake, and proving our 
honesty in a ruinously expensive manner. On the other 
hand, the evidence on which plagiarism is concluded is often 
of a kind which, though much tiaisted in questions of eru- 
dition and historical criticism, is apt to lead us injuriously 
astray in our daily judgments, especially of the resentful, 
condemnatory sort. How Pythagoras came by his ideas, 
whether St. Paul was acquainted with all the Greek poets, 
what Tacitus must have known by hearsay and systemati- 
cally ignored, are points on which a false persuasion of 
knowledge is less damaging to justice and charity than an 
erroneous confidence, supported by reasoning fundamen- 
tally similar, of my neighbor's blameworthy behavior in a 
case where I am personally concerned. 'No premises require 
closer scrutiny than those which lead to the constantly 
echoed conclusion, He must have known,^^ or ^^He must 
have read. I marvel that this facility of belief on the side 
of knowledge can subsist under the daily demonstration 
that the easiest of all things to the human mind is not to 
know and not to read. To praise, to blame, to shout, grin, 
or hiss, where others shout, grin, or hiss — these are nath e 
tendencies; but to know and to read are artificial, hard ac.- 
complishments, concerning which the only safe supposition 
is, that as little of them has been done as the case admits. 
An author, keenly conscious of having written, can hardly 
help imagining his condition of lively interest to be shared 
by others, just as we are all apt to suppose that the chill or 
heat we are conscious of must be general, or even to think 
that our sons and daughters, our pet schemes, and our 
quarreling correspondence, are themes to which intelligent 
persons will listen long without weariness. But if the ar- 
dent author happen to be alive to practical teaching, he will 
soon learn to divide the larger part of the enlightened pub- 
lic into those who have not read him, and think it necessary 
to tell him so when they meet him in polite society, and 
those who have equally abstained from reading him, but 
wish to conceal this negation and speak of his incompar- 
able works with that trust in testimony which always has 
its cheering side. 

Hence it is worse than foolish to entertain silent suspi- 
cions of plagiarism, still more to give them voice, when they 
are founded on a construction of probabilities which a little 
more attention to every-day occurrences as a guide in rea- 


8G IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

soiling would show ns to be really worthless, considered as 
proof. The length to which one man^s memory can go in 
letting drop associations that are vital to another can hardly 
find a limit. It is not to be supposed that a person de- 
sirous to make an agreeable impression on you would de- 
liberately choose to insist to you, with some rhetorical sharp- 
ness, on an argument which you were the first to elaborate 
in public; yet any one who listens may overhear such in- 
stances of obliviousness. You naturally remember your 
peculiar connection with your acquaintance's judicious 
views; but why should he? Your fatherhood, wdiich is an 
intense feeling to you, is only an additional fact of meagre 
interest for him to remember; and a sense of obligation to 
the particular living fellow-struggler who has helped us in 
our thinking, is not yet a form of memory the want of 
which is felt to be disgraceful or derogatory, unless it is 
taken to be a want of polite instruction, or causes the miss- 
ing of a cockade on a day of celebration. In our suspicions 
of plagiarism we must recognize as the first weighty prob- 
ability, that what we who feel injured remember best is pre- 
cisely what is least likely to enter lastingly into the memory 
of our neighbors. But it is fair to maintain that the neigh- 
bor who Arrows your property, loses it for awhile, and 
when it turns up again forgets your connection with it 
and counts it his own, shows himself so much the feebler in 
grasp and rectitude of mind. Some absent persons can not 
remember the state of wear in their own hats and umbrellas, 
and have no mental check to tell them that they have car- 
ried home a fellow-visitor^s more recent purchase; they may 
be excellent householders, far removed from the suspicion 
of low devices, but one wishes them a more correct per- 
ception, and a more wary sense that a neighbor's umbrella 
may be newer than their own. 

True, some persons are so constituted that the very ex- 
cellence of an idea seems to them a convincing reasoii that 
it must be, if not solely, yet especially th.eirs. It fits in so 
beautifully with their general wisdom, it lies implicitly in 
so many of their manifested opinions, that if they have not 
yet expressed it (because of preoccupation) it is clearly a 
part of their indigenous produce, and is proved by their 
immediate eloquent promulgation of it to belong more nat- 
urally and appropriately to them than to the person who 
seemed first to have alighted on it, and who sinks in their 


IMPRESSIOJTS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 87 

all-originating consciousness to that low kind of entity, a 
second cause. This is not lunacy, nor pretense, but a gen- 
uine state of mind very effective in j^ractice, and often carry- 
ing the public with it, so that the poor Columbus is 
found to be a very faulty adventurer, and the continent is 
named after Amerigo. Lighter examples of this instinctive 
appropriation are constantly met with among brilliant 
talkers. Aquila is too agreeable and amusing for any one 
who is not himself bent on display to be angry at his con- 
versational rapine — his habit of darting down on every 
morsel of booty that other birds may hold in tneir beaks, 
with an innocent air, as if it were all intended for his use, 
and honestly counted on by him as a tribute in kind. 
Hardly any man, I imagine, can have had less trouble in 
gathering a showy stock of information than Aquila. On 
close inquiry you would probably find that he had not read 
one epoch-making book of modern times, for he has a ca- 
reer which obliges him to much correspondence and other 
official work, and he is too fond of being in company to 
spend his leisure moments in study; but to his quick eye, 
ear, and tongue, a few predatory excursions in conversation 
where there are instructed persons gradually furnish sur- 
prisingly clever modes of statement and allusion on the 
dominant topic. When he first adopts a subject he neces- 
sarily falls into mistakes, and it is interesting to watch his 
gradual progress into fuller information and better nour- 
ished irony, without his ever needing to admit that he has 
made a blunder or to appear conscious of correction. Sup- 
pose, for example, he had incautiously founded some in- 
genious remarks on a hasty reckoning that nine tliirteens 
made a hundred and two, and the insignificant Bantam, 
hitherto silent, seemed to spoil his fiow of ideas by stating 
that the product could not be taken as less than a hundred 
and seventeen, Aquila would glide on in the most graceful 
manner from a repetition of his previous remark to the 
continuation — All this is on the supposition that a hun- 
dred and two were all that could be got out of nine thir- 
teens; but as all the world knows that nine tliirteens will 
yield, etc. — proceeding straightway into a new train of 
ingenious consequences, and causing Bantam to be regarded 
by all present as one of those slow persons who take irony 
for ignorance, and who would warn the weasel to keep awake. 
How should a small-eyed, feebly-crowing mortal like him 


S8 IMPKESSIOISrS OF THEOrHKASTUS SUCH. 

be quicker in arithmetic than the keen-faced, forcible x\quila, 
in whom universal knowledge is easily credible? Looked 
into closely, the conclusion from a man^s profile, voice, and 
fluency to his certainty in multiplication beyond the twelves, 
seems to show a confused notion of the way in which very 
common things are connected; but it is on such false corre- 
lations that men found half their inferences about each 
other, and high places of trust may sometimes be held on 
no better foundation. 

It is a commonplace that words, writings, measures, and 
performances in general, have qualities assigned them not 
by a direct judgment on the performances themselves, but 
by a presumption of what they are likely to be, considering 
who is the performer. We all notice in our neighbors this 
reference to names as guides in criticism, and all furnish 
illustrations of it in our own practice; for, check ourselves 
as we will, the first impression from any sort of work must 
depend on a previous attitude of mind, and this will con- 
stantly be determined by the influences of a name. But 
that our prior confidence or want of confidence in giving 
names is made up of judgments just as hollow as the con- 
sequent praise or blame they are taken to warrant, is less 
commonly perceived, though there is a conspicuous indica- 
tion of it in the surprise or disappointment often manifested 
in the disclosure of an authorship about which everybody 
has been making wrong guesses. No doubt if it had been 
discovered who wrote the Vestiges,"’^ many an ingenious 
structure of probabilities would have been spoiled, and some 
disgust might have been felt for a real author who made 
comparatively so shabby an appearance of likelihood. It is 
this foolish trust in prepossessions, founded on spurious 
evidence, which makes a medium of encouragement for 
those who, happening to have the ear of the public, give 
other people^s ideas the advantage of appearing uiider their 
own well-received name, while any remonstrance from the 
real producer becomes an unwelcome disturbance of com- 
placency with each person who has paid complimentary 
tributes in the wrong place. 

Hardly any kind of false reason is more ludicrous than 
this on the probabilities of origination. It would be amus- 
ing to catechise the guessers as to their exact reasons for 
thinking their guess ^Mikely:^^ why Hoopoe of John^s has. 
fixed on Toucan of Magdalen; why Shrike attributes its, 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 89 

peculiar style to Buzzard, who has not hitherto been known 
as a writer; why the fair Columbia thinks it must belong 
to the reverend Merula; and why they are all alike dis- 
turbed in their previous judgment of its value by finding 
that it really came from Skunk, whom they had either not 
thought of at all, or thought of as belonging to a species 
excluded by the nature of the case. Clearly they were all 
wrong in their notion of the specific conditions, which lay 
unexpectedly in the small Skunk, and in him alone — in 
spite of his education nobody knows where, in s^^ite. of 
somebody^s knowing his uncles and cousins, and in spite of 
nobody^s knowing tliat he was cleverer than they thought 
him. 

Such guesses remind one of a fabulist^s imaginary council 
of animals assembled to consider what sort of creature had 
constructed a honey-comb found and much tasted by Bruin 
and other epicures. The speakers' all started from the 
probability that the maker was a bird, because this was the 
quarter from which a wondrous nest might be expected; 
for the animals at that time, knowing little of their own 
history, would have rejected as inconceivable the notion 
that a nest could be made by a fish, and as to the insects, 
they were not willingly received in society, and their ways 
were little known. Several complimentary presumptions 
were expressed that the honey-comb was due to one or the 
other admired and popular bird, and there was much fiut- 
tering on the part of the Nightingale and Swallow, neither 
of whom gave a positive denial, their confusion perhaps ex- 
tending to their sense of identity; but the Owl hissed at 
this folly, arguing from his particular knowledge that the 
animal which produced honey must be the Musk-rat, the 
wondrous nature of whose secretions required no proof; 
and, in the powerful logical procedure of the Owl, from 
musk to honey was but a step. Some disturbance arose 
hereupon, for the Musk-rat began to make himself obtru- 
sive, believing in the OwFs opinion of his powers, and feel- 
ing that he could have produced the honey if he had 
thought of it; until an experimental Butcher-bird propos- 
ed to anatomize him as a help to decision. The hubbub 
increased, the opponents of the Musk-rat inquiring who his 
ancestors were; until a diversion was created by an able 
discourse of the Macaw on structures generally, which he 
classified so as to include the honey-comb, entering nito so 


90 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


much admirable exposition that tliere was a prevalent sense 
of the honey-comb having probably been produced by one 
who understood it so well. But Bruin, who had probably 
eaten too much to listen with cd ideation, grumbled in his 
low kind of language, that ^^Fine words butter no pars- 
nips, by which he meant to say that there was no new 
honey forthcoming. 

Perhaps the audience generally was beginning to tire, 
when the Fox entered with his snout dreadfully swollen, 
and reported that the beneficent originator in question was 
the Wasp, which he had found mucli smeared with un- 
doubted honey, having applied his nose to it — whence in- 
deed the able insect, perhaps justifiably irritated at what 
might seem a sign of skepticism, had stung him with some 
severity, an infliction Eeynard could hardly regret, since 
the swelling of a snout normally so delicate would cor- 
roborate his statement, and satisfy the assembly that he had 
really found the honey-creating genius. 

The Fox^s admitted acuteness, combined with the visible 
swelling, were taken as undeniable evidence, and the revel- 
ation undoubtedly met a general desire for information on 
a point of interest. Nevertheless, there was a murmur the 
reverse of delighted, and the feelings of some eminent ani- 
mals were too strong for them: the Orang-outang^s jaw 
dropped so as seriously to impair the vigor of his expres- 
sion, the edifying Pelican screamed and flapped her wings, 
the Owl hissed again, the Macaw became loudly incoherent, 
and the Gibbon gave his hysterical laugh; while the Hyena, 
after indulging in a more splenetic guffaw, agitated the 
question whether it would not be better to hush up the 
whole affair, instead of giving public recognition to an in- 
sect whose produce, it was now plain, had been much over-^ 
estimated. But this narrow-spirited motion was negatived 
by the sweet-toothed majority. A complimentary deputa- 
tion to the AVasp was resolved on, and there was a confident 
hope thaJ this diplomatic measure would tell on the pro- 
duction of honey. 


IMPRES&IOi^S OF THEOPHBASTUS SUCH. 


91 


XXL 

youkg/^ 

Ganymede was once a girlishly handsome^ precocious 
youth. That one can not for any considerable number of 
years go on being youthful, girlishly handsome, and pre- 
cocious, seems, on consideration, to be a statement as 
worthy of credit as the famous syllogistic conclusion, 
‘^Socrates was mortal. But many circumstances have 
conspired to keep up in Ganymede the illusion that he is 
surprisingly young. He was the last born of his family, 
and from his earliest memory was accustomed to be com- 
mended as such to the care of his elder brothers and sisters : 
he heard his mother speak of him as her youngest darling 
with a loving pathos in her tone, which naturally suffused 
his own view of himself, and gave him the habitual con- 
sciousness of being at once very young and very interest- 
ing. Then, the disclosure of his tender years was a con- 
stant matter of astonishment to strangers who had had 
proof of his precocious talents, and the astonishment ex- 
tended to what is called the world at large when he pro- 
duced A Comparative Estimate of European Nations 
before he was well out of his teens. All comers, on a first 
interview, told him that ho was marvelously young, and 
some repeated the statement each time they saw him; all 
critics who wrote about him called attention to the same 
ground for wonder: his deficiencies and excesses w^ere alike 
to be accounted for by the flattering fact of his youth, and 
his youth was the golden background which set off his 
many-hued endowments. Here was already enough to estab- 
lish a strong association between his sense of identity and 
his sense of being unusually young. But after this he de- 
vised and foundeid- au ingenious organization for consol- 
idating the literary interests cf all the four continents 
(subsequently including Australasia and Polynesia), he 
himself presiding in the central office, which thus became 
a new theater for the constantly repeated situation of -an 
astonished stranger in the presence of a boldly scheming 
administrator found to be remarkably young. If we imag- 
ine with due charity the effect on Ganymede, we shall think 


92 


IMPRESSIOKS OF THEOrHRASTTJS SUCH. 


it greatly to liis credit that he continued to feel the necessity 
ol being something more than young, and did not sink by 
rapid degrees into a parallel of that melancholy object, a 
superannuated youthful phenomenon. Happily he had 
enough of valid, active faculty to save him from that tragic 
fate. He had not exhausted his fountain of eloquent opin- 
ion in his Comparative Estimate, so as to feel himself, 
like some other juvenile celebrities, the sad survivor of his 
own manifest destiny, or like one who has risen too early in 
the morning, and finds all the solid day turned into a 
fatigued afternoon. He has continued to be productive 
both of schemes and writings, being perhaps helped by the 
fact that his Comparative Estimate did not greatly 
affect the currents of European thought, and left him with 
the stimulating hope that he had not done his best, but 
might yet produce what would make his youth more sur- 
prising than ever. 

I saw something of him through his Antinous period, the 
time of rich chestnut locks, parted not by a visible white 
line, but by a shadowed furrow from which they fell in 
Uiassive ripples to right and left. In these slim days he 
hooked the younger for being rather below the middle size; 
and though, at last, one perceived him contracting an in- 
definable air of self-consciousness, a slight exaggeration of 
tlie facial movements, the attitudes, the little tricks, and 
tlie romance in shirt collars, which must be expected from 
one who, in spite of his knowledge, was so exceedingly 
young, it was impossible to say that he was making any 
great mistake about himself. He was only undergoing one 
form of a common moral disease: being strongly mirrored 
for himself in the remarks of others, he was getting to see 
his real characteristics as a dramatic part, a type to which 
his doings were always in correspondence. Owing to my 
absence on travel, and to other causes, I had lost sight of 
him for-^veral years, but such a separation between two 
who have not missed each other, seems, in this busy cent- 
ury, only a pleasant reason, when they liappen to meet 
again in some old accustomed haunt,, for the one who has 
stayed at home to be more communicative about himself 
than he can well be to those who have all along been in his 
neighborhood. He had married in the interval, and, as if to 
keep up his surprising youthfulness in all relations, he had 
taken a wife considerably older than himself. It would 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


93 


probably have seemed to him a disturbing inversion of the 
natural order that any one very near to him should have 
been younger than he except his own children^ who, how- 
ever young, would not necessarily hinder the normal sur- 
prise at the youthfulness of their father. And if my glance 
had revealed my impression on first seeing him again, he 
might have received a rather disagreeable shock, which was 
far from my intention. My mind, having retained a very 
exact image of his former appearance, took note of unmis- 
takable changes, such as a painter would certainly not have 
made by way of flattering his subject. He had lost his 
slimness, and that curved solidity which^fiiignt have adorned 
a taller man was a rather sarcastic threat to his short figure. 

The English branch of the 'Teutonic race^ does not pro- 
duce many fat youths, and I have even heard an American 
lady say that she was much disappointed^^ at the moder- 
ate number and size of our fat men, considering their repu- 
tation in the United States; hence a stranger would now 
have been apt to remark that Ganymede was]unsually plump 
for a distinguished writer, rather than unusually young. 
But how was he to know this? Many long-standing prepos- 
sessions are as hard to be corrected as a long-standing 
mispronunciation, against which the direct experience of 
eye and ear is often powerless. And I could perceive that 
Ganymede^s inwrought sense of his surprising youthfulness 
had been stronger than the superficial reckoning of his 
years and the merely optical phenomena of the looking- 
glass. He now held a post under government, and not only 
saw like most subordinate functionaries, how ill every- 
thing was managed, but also what were the changes that a 
high constructive ability would dictate; and in mentioning 
to me his own speeches and other elforts toward propagat- 
ing reformatory views in his department, he concluded by 
changing his tone to a sentimental head voice and saying — 

But I am so young; people object to any prominence 
on my part; I can only get myself heard anonymously, and 
when some attention has been drawn the name is sure to 
creep out. The writer is known to be young, and things 
are none the forwarder. 

^nVell,^^ said I, youth seems the only drawback that is 
6ure to diminish. You and I have seven years less of it 
than when we last met. 

Ah?” returaed Ganymede; as lightly as possible; at the 


04 


IMPKESSIOKS OF THKOPHKASTUS SUCH. 


same time casting an observant glance over me, as if he 
were marking the effect of seven years on a person who had 
probably begun life with an old look, and even as an infant 
had given his countenance to that significant doctrine, the 
transmigration of ancient souls into modern bodies. 

I left him on that occasion without any melancholy fore- 
cast that his illusion would be suddenly or painfully broken 
up. I saw that he was well victualed and defended against 
a ten years^ siege from ruthless facts; and in the. course of 
time observation convinced me that his resistance received 
considerable aid from without. Each of his written pro- 
ductions, as it came out, was still commented on as the 
Avork of a very young man. One critic, finding that he 
wanted solidity, charitably referred to his youth as an ex- 
cuse. Another, dazzled by his brilliancy, seemed to regard 
his youth as so wondrous that all other authors appeared 
decrepit by comparison, and their style such as might be 
looked for from gentlemen of the old school. Able pens 
(according to a familiar metaphor) appeared to shake their- 
heads good-humoredly, implying that Ganymede^s crudi- 
ties were pardonable in one so exceedingly young. Such 
unanimity amid diversity, which a distant posterity might 
take for evidence that on the point of age at least there 
could have been no mistake, was not really more difficult 
to account for than the prevalence of cotton in our fabrics. 
Ganymede had been first introduced into the writing world 
as remarkably young, and it was no exceptional consequence 
that the first deposit of information about him held its 
ground against facts which, however open to observation, 
were not necessarily thought of. It is not so easy, with our 
rates and taxes and need for economy in all directions, to 
cast away an epithet or remark that turns up cheaply, and 
to go in expensive search after more genuine substitutes. 
There is high Homeric precedent for keeping fast hold of 
an epithet imder all changes of circumstance, and so the 
precocious author of the Comparative Estimate heard 
the echoes repeating Young Ganymede when an illiter- 
ate beholder at a railway station would have given him 
forty years at least. Besides, important elders, sachems of 
the clubs and public meetings, had a geiiuine opinion of 
him as young enough to be checked for speech on subjects 
which they had spoken mistakenly about when he was in 
his cradle; and then^ the midway parting of his crisp hair, 


IMPRESSIOITS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


95 


not common among English committee men, .formed a 
presumption against the ripeness of his judgment which 
nothing but a speedy baldness could have removed. 

It is but fair to mention all these outward confirmations 
of Gany models illusion, which shows no signs of leaving 
him. It is true that he no longer hears expressions of sur- 
prise at his youthfulness, on a first introduction to an ad- 
miring reader; but this sort of external evidence has 
become an unnecessary crutch to his habitual inward per- 
suasion. His manners, his costume, his suppositions of the 
impression he makes on others, have all their former cor- 
respondence with the dramatic part of the young genius. 
As to the incongruity of his contour and other little acci- 
dents of physique, he is probably no more aware that they 
will affect others as incongruities than Armida is conscious 
how much her rouge provokes our notice of lier wrinkles, 
and causes us to mention sarcastically that motherly age 
which we should otherwise regard with affectionate rever- 
ence. 

But let us be just enough to admit that there may be old- 
young coxcombs as well as old-young coquettes. 


XIII. 

HOW WE COME TO GIVE OURSELVES FALSE TESTIMONIALS, 
AND BELIEVE IN THEM. 

It is my way when I observe any instance of folly, any 
queer habit, any absurd illusion, straightway to look for 
something of the same type in myself, feeling sura that, 
amid all differences, there will be a certain correspondence; 
just as there is more or less correspondence in the natural 
history even of continents widely apart, and of islands in 
opposite zones. No doubt men^s minds differ in what we 
may call their climate or share of solar energy, and a feel- 
ing or tendency which is comparable to a panther in one 
may have no more imposing aspect than that of a weasel 
in another: some are like a tropical habitat in which the 
very ferns cast a mighty shadow, and the grasses are a dry 
ocean in which a hunter may be submerged; others like 
the chilly latitudes in which your forest-tree, fit elsewhere 
to prop a mine, is a pretty miniature suitable for fancy 


96 


IMPRESSIOl^S OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


potting. The eccentric man might be typified by the Aus- 
tralian fauna^ refuting half our judicious assumptions of 
what nature allows. Still, whether fate commanded us to 
thatch our persons among the Eskimos or to choose the 
latest thing in tattooing among the Polynesian isles, our 
precious guide Comparison would teach us in the first place 
by likeness, and our clew to further knowledge would be 
resemblance to what we already know. Hence, having a 
keen interest in the natural history of my inward self, I 
pursue this plan I have mentioned of using my observation 
as a clew or lantern by which I detect small herbage or 
lurking life; or I take my neighbor in his least becoming 
tricks or efforts as an opportunity for luminous deduction 
concerning the figure the human genus makes in the speci- 
men which I myself furnish. 

Introspection which starts with the purpose of finding 
out one^s own absurdities is not likely to be very mischiev- 
ous, yet of course it is not free from dangers any more 
than breathing is, or the other functions that keep us alive 
and active. To judge of others by one^s self is in its most 
innocent meaning the briefest expression for our only 
method of knowing mankind; yet, we perceive, it has come 
to mean in many cases either the vulgar mistake which re- 
duces every man^s value to the very low figure at which the 
valuer himself happens to stand; or else, the amiable illu- 
sion of the higher nature misled by a too generous con- 
struction of the lower. One can not give a recipe for good 
judgment; it resembles appropriate muscular action, which 
is attained by the myriad lessons in nicety of balance and 
of aim that only practice can give. The danger of the in- 
verse v procedure, judging of self by what one observes in 
others, if it is carried on with much impartiality and keen- 
ness of discernment, is that it has a laming effect, enfee- 
bling' the energies of indignation and scorn, which are the 
proper scourges of wrong-doing and meanness, and which 
should continually feed the wholesome restraining power 
of public opinion. I respect the horsewhip when applied 
to the back of cruelty, and think that he who applies it is 
a more perfect human being because his outleap of indig*^ 
nation is not checked by a too curious refiection on the nat- 
ure of guilt — a, more perfect human being because he more 
completely incorporates the best social life of the race, 
which can never be constituted by ideas that nullify [iction 


IMPKESSIOi^^S OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 97 

This is the essence of Dante^s sentiment (it is painful to 
think that he applies it very cruelly) 

“ E cortesia fh, hii esser villano — ” * 

and it is undeniable that a too intense consciousness of one^s 
kinsliip, with all frailties and vices^ undermines the active 
heroism which battles against wrong. 

But certainly nature has taken care that this danger 
should not at present be very threatening. One could not 
fairly describe the generality of one^s neighbors as too 
lucidly aware of manifesting in their own persons the weak- 
nesses which they observe in the rest of her majesty^s sub- 
jects; on the contrary, a hasty conclusion as to schemes of 
Providence might lead to the supposition that one man was 
intended to correct another by being most intolerant of the 
ugly quality or trick which he himself possesses. Doubtless 
philosophers will be able to explain how it must necessarily 
be so, but pending the full extension of the a priori method, 
which will show that only blockheads could expect anything 
to be otherwise, it does seem surprising that Heloisa should 
be disgusted at Laura^s attempts to disguise her age — at- 
temjDts which she recognizes so thoroughly because they 
enter into her own practice; that Semper, who often re- 
sponds at public dinners and proposes resolutions on plat- 
forms, though he has a trying gestation of every speech 
and a bad time for himself and others at every delivery, 
should yet remark pitilessly on the folly of precisely the 
same course of action in Ubique; that Aliquis, who lets no 
attack on himself pass unnoticed, and for every handful of 
gravel against his windows sends a stone in reply, should 
deplore tlie ill-advised retorts of Quispiam, who does not 
perceive that to show one^s self angry with an adversary is 
to gratify him. To be unaware of our own little tricks of 
manner, or our own mental blemishes and excesses, is a 
comprehensible unconsciousness; the puzzling fact is that 
people should apparently take lio account of their deliberate 
actions, and should expect them to be equally ignored by 
others. It is an inversion of the accepted order: there it is 
the phrases that are official and the conduct or privately 
manifested sentiment that is taken to be real; here it seems 
that the practice is taken to be official, and entirely nullified 


4 


* Inferno, xxxii. 150. 


98 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


by the verbal representation which contradicts it. The 
thief making a vow to Heaven of full restitution and whis- 
pering some reservations, expecting to cheat Omniscience 
by an aside/'’ is hardly more ludicrous than the many 
ladies and gentlemen who have more belief, and expect 
others to have it, in their own statement about their habit- 
ual doings than in the contradictory fact which is patent 
in the daylight. One reason of the absurdity is that we are 
led by a tradition about ourselves, so that long after a man 
has practically departed from a rule or principle, he con- 
tinues innocently to state it as a true description of his 
practice — just as he has a long tradition that he is not an 
old gentleman, and is startled when he is seventy at over- 
hearing himself called by an epithet which he has only ap- 
plied to others. 

A person with your tendency of constitution should 
take as little sugar as possible, said Pilulus toBovis some- 
where in the darker decades of this century. It has made 
a great difference to Avis since he took my advice in that 
matter: he used to consume half a pound a day.'’^ 

God bless me!'’^ cries Bovis. I take very little sugar 
myself. 

Twenty-six large lumps every day of your life, Mr. 
Bovis, says his wife. 

^^No such thing exclaims Bovis. 

You drop them into your tea, coffee, and whisky 
3^ourself, my dear, and I count them. 

Nonsense laughs Bovis, turning to Pilulus, that they 
may exchange a glance of mutual amusement at a woman^s 
inaccuracy. 

But she happened to be right. Bovis had never said in- 
wardly that he would take a large allowance of sugar, and 
he had the tradition about himself that he was a man of 
the most moderate habits; hence, with this conviction, he 
was natural^ disgusted at the saccharine excesses of Avis. 

I have sometimes thought that this facility of men in be- 
lieving that they are still what they once meant to be — 
this undisturbed appropriation of a traditional character 
which is often but a melancholy relic of early resolutions, 
like the worn and soiled testimonial of soberness and hon- 
esty carried in the pocket of a tippler whom the need of a 
dram has driven into peculation — may sometimes diminish 
the turpitude of what seems a flat, barefaced falsehood. 


IMPKESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


99 


It is notorious that a man may go on uttering false asser- 
tions about his own acts till he at last believes in them : 
is it not possible that sometimes in the very first utterance 
there may be a shade of creed-reciting belief, a reproduc- 
tion of a traditional self which is clung to against all evi- 
dence? There is no knowing all the disguises of the lying 
serpent. 

When we come to examine in detail what is the sane 
mind in the sane body, the final test of completeness seems 
to be a security of distinction between what we have pro- 
fessed and what we have done; what we have aimed at and 
what we have achieved; whet we have invented and what 
we have witnessed or had evidenced to us; what we think 
and feel in the present, and what we thought and felt in 
the past. 

I know that there is a common prejudice which regards 
the habitual confusion of noio and then, of it ivas and it is, 
of it seemed so and I should lilee it to he so, as a mark of 
high imaginative endowment, while the power of precise 
statement and description is rated lower, as the attitude of 
an every-day prosaic mind. High imagination is often as- 
signed or claimed as if it were a ready activity in fabricat- 
ing extravagances such as are presented by fevered dreams, 
or as if its possessors were in that state of inability to give 
credible testimony, which would warrant their exclusion 
from the class of acceptable witnesses in a court of justice; 
so that a creative genius might fairly be subjected to the 
disability which some laws have stamped on dicers, slaves, 
and other classes whose position was held perverting to 
their sense of social responsibility. 

This endowment of mental confusion is often boasted of by 
persons whosejmaginativeness would not otherwise be known, 
unless it were by the slow process of detecting that their de- 
scriptions and narratives were not to be trusted. Callista 
is always ready to testify of herself that she is an imagina- 
tive person, and sometimes adds in illustration, that if she 
had taken a walk and seen an old heap of stones on her way, 
the account she would give on her returning would include 
many pleasing particulars of her own invention, transform- 
ing the simple heap into an interesting castellated ruin. 
This creative freedom is all very well in the right place, but 
before I can grant it to be a sign of unusual mental power, 
I must inquire whether, on being requested to give a precise 


100 


IMPEESSIOXS OF THEOPHEASTUS SUCH. 


description of what she saw, she would be able to cast aside 
her arbitrary combinations and recover the objects she 
really perceived, so as to make them recognizable by an- 
other person who passed the same way. Otherwise her 
glorifying imagination is not an addition to the fundament- 
al power of strong, discerning perception, but a cheaper 
substitute. And, in fact, I find, on listening to Callista's 
conversation, that she has a very lax conception even of 
common objects, and an equally lax memory of events. It 
seems of no consequence to her whether she shall say that 
a stone is overgrown with moss or with lichen, that a build- 
ing is of sandstone or of granite, that Meliboeus once forgot 
to put on his cravat, or that he always appears without it; 
that everybody says so, or that one stock-broker's wife said 
so yesterday, that Philemon praised Euphemia up to the 
skies, or that he denied knowing any particular evil of her. 
She is one of those respectable witnesses who would testify 
to the exact moment of an apparition, because any desir- 
able moment will be as exact as another to her remem- 
brance; or who would be the most worthy to witness the 
action of spirits on slates and tables because the action of 
limbs would not probably arrest her attention. She would 
describe the surprising phenomena exhibited by the power- 
ful Medium with the same freedom that she vaunted in re- 
lation to the old heap of stones. Her supposed imagina- 
tiveness is simply a very usual lack of discriminating 
perception, accompanied with a less usual activity of mis- 
representation, which, if it had been a little more intense, 
or had been stimulated by circumstance, might have made 
her a profuse writer unchecked by the troublesome need of 
veracity. 

These characteristics are the very opposite of such as yield 
a fine imagination, which is always based on a keen vision, a 
keen consciousness of what is, and carries the store of def- 
inite knowledge as material for the construction of its in- 
ward visions. Witness Dante, who is at once the most pre- 
cise and homely in his reproduction of actual objects, and 
the most soaringly at large in his imaginative combinations. 
On a much lower level we distinguish the hyperbole and 
rapid development in descriptions of persons and events 
which are lit up by humorous intention in the speaker — 
we distinguish this charming play of intelligence which re- 
sembles musical improvisation on a given motive, where 


IMPKESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


101 


the furthest sweep of curve is looped into relevancy by an 
instinctive method^ from the florid inaccuracy or helpless 
exaggeration which is really something commoner than the 
correct simplicity often depreciated as prosaic. 

Even if high imagination were to be identified with illu- 
sion, there would be the same sort of difference between 
the imperial wealth of illusion which is informed by 
industrious, submissive observation, and the trumpery 
stage property illusion which depends on the ill-defined 
impressions gathered by capricious inclination, as there 
is between a good and a bad picture of the Last Judg- 
ment. In both these the subject is a combination never 
actually witnessed, and in the good iDicture the general com- 
bination may be of surpassing boldness; but on examina- 
tion it is seen that the separate elements have to be studied 
from real objects. And even where we find the charm of 
ideal elevation with wrong drawing and fantastic color, the 
charm is dependent on the seductive sensibility of the painter 
to certain real delicacies of form which confer the expres- 
sion he longed to render; for apart from this basis of an 
effect perceived in common, there could be no conveyance 
of aesthetic meaning by the painter to the beholder. In 
this sense it is as true to say of Fra Angelico ^s Coronation 
of the Virgin, that it has a strain of reality, as to say so of 
a portrait by Kembrandt, which has also its strain of ideal 
elevation due to Eembrandt^s virile selective sensibility. 

To correct such self-flatterers as Callista, it *is worth re- 
peating that powerful imagination is not false outward 
vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative 
energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minu- 
tiae of experience, which it reproduces and constructs in 
fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual confusion of prov- 
able fact with the fictions of fancy and transient inclina- 
tion, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every 
material object, every incidental fact, with far-reaching 
memories and stored residues of passion, bringing into new 
light the less obvious relations of human existence. The 
allusion to which it is liable is not that of habitually tak- 
ing duck ponds for lilied pools, but of being more or less 
transiently and in varying degrees so absorbed in ideal vision 
as to lose the consciousness of surrounding objects or occur- 
rences; and when that rapt condition is past, the same 
genius discriminates clearly between what has l3een given 


102 IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

in this parenthetic state of excitement, and what he has 
known, and may count on, in the ordinary world of experi- 
ence. Dante seems to have expressed these conditions per- 
fectly in that passage of the Purgatorio where, after a 
triple vision which has made him forget his surroundings, 
he says: 

“ Quando ranima mia torno di fuori 
Alle cose die son fuor di le i vere, 
lo ricoiiobbi i miei non falsi errori.” — C. xv. 

He distinguishes the ideal truth of his entranced vision 
from the series of external facts to which his consciousness 
had returned. Isaiah gives us the date of his vision in the 
Temple — the year that King Uzziahdied^^ — and if after- 
ward the mighty- winged seraphim were present with him 
as he trod the street, he doubtless knew them for images 
of memory, and did not cry ^^Look!^'’ to the passers-by. 

Certainly the seer, whether prophet, jDhilosopher, scienti- 
fic discoverer, or poet, may happen to be rather mad; his 
powers may have been used up, like Don Quixote^ in their 
visionary or theoretic constructions, so that the reports of 
common sense fail to affect him, or the continuous strain 
of excitement may have robbed his mind of its elasticity. 
It is hard for our frail mortality to carry the burden of 
greatness with steady gait and full alacrity of perception. 
But he is the strongest seer, who can support the stress of 
creative energy, and yet keep that sanity of expectation 
which consists in distinguishing, as Dante does, between 
the cose die son vere outside the individual mind, and the 
non falsi errori y(]i\Q\\ Me the revelations of true imagin- 
ative power. 


XIV. 

THE TOO READY WRITER. 

One who talks too much, hindering the rest of the com- 
pany from taking their turn, and apparently seeing no rea- 
son why they should not rather desire to know his opinion 
or experience in relation to all subjects, or at least to re- 
nounce the discussion of any topic where he can make no 
figure, has never been praised for this industrious monopoly 
of work which others would willingly have shared in. 


TMPEESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 103 

However various and brilliant his talk may be, we susi^ect 
him of impoverishing us by excluding the contributions of 
other minds, which attract our curiosity the more because 
he has shut them up in silence. Besides, we get tired of a 
manner in conversation as in painting, when one theme 
after another is treated with the same lines and touches. 
I begin with a liking for an estimable master, but by the 
time he has stretched his interpretation of the world un- 
brokenly along a palatial gallery, I have had what the cau- 
tious Scotch mind would call enough of him. There is 
monotony and narrowness already to spare in my own 
identity; what comes to me from without should be larger 
and more impartial than the judgment of any single in- 
terpreter. On this ground even a modest person, without 
power or will to shine in the conversation, may easily find 
the predominating talker a nuisance, while those who are 
full of matter on special topics are continually detecting 
miserably thin places in the web of that information which 
he will not desist from imparting. Nobody that I know of 
ever proposed a testimonial to a man for thus volunteering 
the whole expense of the conversation. 

Why is there a different standard of judgment with re- 
gard to a writer who plays much the same part in literature 
as the excessive talker plays in what is traditionally called 
conversation? The busy Adrastus, whose professional en- 
gagements might seem more than enough for the nervous 
energy of one man, and who yet finds time to print essays 
on the chief current subjects, from the tri-lingual inscrip'- 
tions, or the Idea of the Infinite among the prehistoric 
Lapps, to the Colorado beetle and the grape disease in the 
south of France, is generally praised, if not admired, for 
the breadth of his mental range and his gigantic powers of 
work. Poor Theron, who has some original ideas on a sub- 
ject to which he has given years of research and meditation,, 
has been waiting anxiously from month to month to see 
whether his condensed exposition will find a place in the 
next advertised programme, but sees it, on the contrary, 
regularly excluded, and twice the space he asked for fill^ 
with the copious brew of Adrastus, whose name carries cus- 
tom like a celebrated trade-mark. Why should the eager 
haste to tell what he thinks on the shortest notice, as if his 
opinion were a needed preliminary to discussion, get a man 
the reputation of being a conceited bore in conversation. 


104 


IMPKESSIOKS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


^vhen nobody blames the same tendency if it shows itself in 
print? The excessive talker can only be in one gathering 
at a time, and there is the comfort of thinking that every- 
where else other fellow-citizens who have something to say 
may get a chance of delivering themselves; but the exorbi- 
tant writer can occupy space and S23read over it the more 
or less agreeable flavor of his mind in four mediums at 
once, and on subjects taken from the four winds. Such 
restless and versatile occupants of literary space and time 
should have lived earlier, when the world wanted summar- 
ies of all extant knowledge, and this knowledge being small, 
there was the more room for commentary and conjecture. 
They might have, played the part of an Isidor of Seville or 
u, Vincent of Beauvais brilliantly, and the willingness to 
write everything themselves would have been strictly in 
place. In the present day, the busy retailer of other 2 )eo- 
ple^s knowledge which he has spoiled in the handling, the 
restless guesser and commentator, the importunate hawker 
of undesirable superfluities, the everlasting word compiler 
who rises early in the morning to, praise what the world has 
already glorified, or makes himself haggard at night in 
writing out his descent from what nobody ever believed, is 
not simply gratis anlielans, mnlia agendo nihil agens — he 
is an obstruction. Like an incompetent architect with too 
much interest at his back, he obtrudes his ill-considered 
work where place ought to have been left to better men. 

Is it out of the question that we should entertain some 
scruple about mixing our own flavor, as of the too cheap 
and insistent nutmeg, with that of every great writer and 
every great subject, especially when our flavor is all we 
have to give, the matter or knowledge having been already 
given by somebody else? What if we were only like the 
Sj^anish wine-skins which impress the innocent stranger with 
the notion that the Spanish grajoe has naturally a taste of 
leather ?^One could wish that even the greatest minds 
should leave some themes unhandled, or at least leave us 
no more than a paragraph or two on them to show how 
well they did in not being more lengthy. 

Such entertainment of scruple can hardly be expected 
from the young; but hai3pily their I’eadiness to mirror the 
universe anew for the rest of mankind is not encouraged by 
easy publicity. In the vivacious Pepin T have often seen 
the image of my early youth, when it seemed to me aston- 


IMPKESSIONS OF THEOPHllASTUS SUCH, 


105 


ishing that the philosophers liad left so many difficulties 
unsolved, and that so many great themes had raised no 
great poet to treat them. I had an elated sense that I 
sliould find my brain full of theoretic clews when I looked 
for them, and that wherever a poet had not done what I 
had expected, it was for want of my insight. . Not knowing 
what had been said about the play of Eomeo and Juliet, 

I felt myself capable of writing something original on its 
blemishes and beauties. In relation to all subjects I had a 
joyous consciousness of that ability which is prior to knowl- 
edge, and of only needing to apply myself in order to mas- 
ter any task — to conciliate philosophers whose systems were 
at present but dimly known to me, to estimate foreign 
poets whom I had not yet read, to show up mistakes in a 
historical monograph that roused my interest in an epoch 
which I had been hitherto ignorant of, when I should once 
have had time to verify my views of probability by looking 
into an encyclopaedia. So Pepin; save only that he is in- 
dustrious while I was idle. Like the astronomer in Easselas, 
I swayed the universe in my consciousness without making 
any difference outside me; whereas Pepin, while feeling 
himself powerful with the stars in their courses, really 
raises some dust here below. 

He is no longer in his spring-tide; but having been al- 
ways busy, he has been obliged to use his first impressions 
as if they were deliberate opinions and to range himself on 
the corresponding side in ignorance of much that he com- 
mits himself to; so that he retains some characteristics of a 
comparatively tender age, and among them a certain sur- 
prise that there have not been more persons equal to him- 
self. Perhaps it is unfortunate for him that he early 
gained a hearing, or at least a place in print, and was thus 
encouraged in acquiring a fixed habit of writing to the 
exclusion of any other bread-winning pursuit. He is al- 
ready to be classed as a general writer, corresponding to 
the comprehensive wants of th3 general reader, and 
with this industry on his hands it is not enough for him to 
keep up the ingenuous self-reliance of youth: he finds him- 
self under an obligation to be skilled in various methods 
of seeming to know; and having habitually expressed him- 
self before he was convinced, his interest in all subjects is 
chiefly to ascertain that he has not made a mistake, and to 
feel his infallibility confirmed. That impulse to decide. 


106 IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

that vague sense of being able to achieve the unattempted, 
that dream of athlal unlimited movement at will without 
feet or wings^ which were once but the joyous mounting of 
young sap, are already taking shape as unalterable woody 
fibre: the impulse has hardened into style/^ and into a 
pattern of peremptory sentences; the sense of ability in the 
presence of other men^s failures is turning into the official 
arrogance of one who habitually issues directions which he 
has never himself been called on to execute; the dreamy 
buoyancy of the stripling has taken on a fatal sort of re- 
ality in written pretensions which carry consequences. He 
is on the way to become like the loud-buzzing, bouncing 
Bombus, wffio combines conceited illusions enough to sup- 
ply several patients in a lunatic asylum, with the freedom 
to show himself at large in various forms of print. If one 
who takes himself for the telegraphic center of all Ameri- 
can wires is to be confined as unfit to transact affairs, what 
shall we say to the man who believes himself in possession 
of the unexpressed motives and designs dwelling in the 
breasts of all sovereigns and all politicians? And I grieve 
to think that poor Pepin, though less political, may by 
and by manifest a persuasion hardly more sane, for he is 
beginning to explain people’s writings by what he does not 
know about them. Yet he was once at the comparatively 
innocent stage which I have confessed to be that of my 
own early astonishment at my powerful originality; and 
copying the just humility of *the old Puritan, I may say, 
^^But for the grace of discouragement, this coxcombry 
might have been mine. ” 

Pepin made for himself a necessity of writing (and get- 
ting printed) before he had considered whether he had the 
knowledge or belief that w^ould furnish eligible matter. At 
first, perhaps, the necessity galled him a little, but it is now 
as easily borne, nay, is as irrepressible a habit as the out- 
pouring of inconsiderate talk. He is gradually being con- 
demned tohave no genuine impressions, no direct conscious- 
ness of enjoyment or the reverse from the quality of what 
is before him : his perceptions are continually arranging 
themselves in forms suitable to a printed judgment, and 
hence they will often turn out to be as much to the purpose 
if they are written without any direct contemplation of the 
object, and are guided by a few external conditions which 
serve to classify it for him. In this way he is irrevocably 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


107 


losing the faculty of accurate mental vision: having bound 
himself to express judgments which will satisfy some other 
demands than that of veracity, he has blunted his percep- 
tions by continual preoccupation. We can not command 
veracity at will: the power of seeing and reporting truly 
is a form of health that has to be delicately guarded, and 
as an ancient Eabbi has solemnly said, The penalty of 
untruth is untruth. But Pepin is only a mild example of 
the fact that incessant writing with a view to printing car- 
ries internal consequences which have often the nature of 
disease. And however unpractical it may be held to con- 
sider whether we have anything to print which it is good for 
the world to read, or which has not been better said before, 
it will perhaps be allowed to be worth considering what 
effect the printing may have on ourselves. Clearly there is 
a sort of writing which helps to keep the writer in a ridicu- 
lously contented ignorance; raising in him continually the 
sense of having delivered himself effectively, so that the 
acquirement of more thorough knowledge seems as super- 
fluous as the purchase of costume for a past occasion. He 
has invested his vanity (perhaps his hope of income) in his 
own shallownesses and mistakes, and must desire their 
prosperity. Like the professional prophet, he learns to be 
glad of the harm that keeps up his credit, and to be sorry 
for the good that contradicts him. It is hard enough for 
any of us, amidst the changing winds of fortune and the 
hurly-burly of events, to keep quite clear of a gladness 
which is another's calamity; but one may choose not to en- 
ter on a course which will turn such gladness into a flxed 
habit of mind, committing ourselves to be continually 
pleased that others should appear to be wrong in order that 
we may have the air of being right. 

In some cases, perhaps, it might be urgent that Pepin 
has remained the more self-contented because he has not 
written everything he believed himself capable of. He once 
asked me to read a sort of programme of the species of 
romance which he should think it worth while to write — a 
species which he contrasted in strong terms with the pro- 
ductions of illustrious but overrated authors in this branch. 
Pepin^s romance was to present the splendors of the Roman 
Empire at the culmination of its grandeur, when decadence 
was spiritually but not visibly imminent: it was to show the 
workings of human passion in the most pregnant and ex- 


10 ^ 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


alted of human circumstances, the designs of statesmen, 
the interfusion of philosophies, the rural relaxation and 
converse of immortal poets, the majestic triumphs of war- 
riors, the mingling of the quaint and sublime in religious 
ceremony, the gorgeous delirium of gladiatorial shows, and 
under all the secretly working leaven of Christianity. Such 
a romance would not call the attention of society to the 
dialect of stable-boys, the low habits of rustics, the vulgar- 
ity of small school-masters, the manners of men in livery, or 
to any other form of uneducated talk and sentiments: its 
characters would have virtues and vices alike on the grand 
scale, and would express themselves in an English repre- 
senting the discourse of the most powerful minds in the 
best Latin, or possibly Greek, when there occurred a scene 
with a Greek philosopher on a visit to Eome or resident 
there as a teacher. In this way Pepin would do in fiction 
what had never been done before: something not at all like 

Eienzi or Notre Lame de Paris, or any other attempt 
of that kind; but something at once more penetrating and 
more magnificent, more passionate and more philosophical, 
more panoramic yet more select: something that would 
present a conception of a gigantic period; in short, some- 
thing truly Eoman and world-historical. 

When Pepin gave me this programme to read he was 
much younger than at present. Some slight success in an- 
other vein diverted him. from the production of panoramic 
and select romance, and the experience of not having tried 
to carry out his programme has naturally made him more 
biting and sarcastic on the failures of those who have actu- 
ally written romances without apparently having had a 
glimpse of a conception equal to his. Indeed, I am often 
comparing his rather touchingly inflated naivete, as of a 
small, young person walking on tiptoe while he is talking 
of elevated things, at the time when he felt himself the 
author of-^Jiat unwritten romance, with his present epi- 
grammatic curtness and affectation of power kept strictly 
in reserve. His paragraphs now seem to have a bitter 
smile in them, from the consciousness of a mind too pene- 
trating to accept any other man^s ideas, and too equally 
competent in all directions to seclude his power in any one 
form of creation, but rather fitted to hang over them all as 
a lamp of guidance to the stumblers below. You perceive 
how jiroud he is of not being indebted to any writer: even 


IMPEESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 109 

with the dead he is on the creditor's side, for he is doing 
them the service of letting the world know what they 
meant better than those poor pre-Pepinians themselves had 
any means of doing, and he treats the mighty shades very 
cavalierly. 

Is this fellow-citizen of ours, considered sim23ly in the 
light of a baj)tized Christian and tax-paying Englishman, 
really as madly conceited, as empty of reverential feeling, 
as unveracious and careless of justice, as full of catch- 
penny devices and stagy attitudinizing as on examination 
his writing shows itself to be? By no means. He has ar- 
rived at his present pass in the literary calling through 
the self-imposed obligation to give himself a manner which 
would convey the impression of superior knowledge and 
ability. He is much worthier and more admirable than his 
written productions, because the moral aspects exhibited in 
his writing are felt to be ridiculous or disgraceful in the 
personal relations of life. In blaming Pepin^s writing we 
are accusing the public conscience, which is so lax and ill- 
informed on the momentous bearings of authorship that it 
sanctions the total absence of scruple in undertaking and 
prosecuting what should be the best warranted of vocations. 

Hence I still accept friendly relations with Pepin, for he 
has much private amiability; and though he probably thinks 
of me as a man of slender talents, without rapidity of 
coup d^oeil and with no compensatory penetration, he meets 
me very cordially, and would not,- 1 am sure, willingly pain 
me in conversation by crudely declaring his low estimate of 
my capacity. Yet I have often known him to insult my 
betters, and contribute (perhaps unreflectingly to encour- 
age injurious conceptions of them; but that was done in 
the course of his professional writing, and the public con- 
science still leaves such writing nearly on the level of the 
Merry- Andrew^s dress, which permits an impudent deport- 
ment and extraordinary gambols to one who i]i his ordinary 
clothing shows himself the decent father of a family. 


XV. 


DISEASES OF SMALL AUTHORSHIP. 

Particular callings, it is known, encourage particular 
diseases. There is a painter^s colic; the Sheffield grinder 


110 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


falls a victim to the inhalation of steel dust; clergymen sr 
often have a certain kind of sore throat that this otherwise 
secular ailment gets named after them. And perhaps, if 
we were to inquire, we should find a similar relation be- 
tween certain moral ailments and these various occupations, 
though here in the case of clergymen there would be specific 
differences: the poor curate, equally with the rector, is 
liable to clergyman's sore throat, but he would probably be 
found free from the chronic moral ailments encouraged by 
the possession of glebe and those higlier chances of prefer- 
ment which follow on having a good position already. On 
the other hand, the poor curate might have severe attacks 
of calculating expectancy concerning parishioners^ turkeys, 
cheese, and fat geese, or of uneasy rivalry for the dona- 
tions of clerical charities. 

Authors are so miscellaneous a class that their personi- 
fied diseases, physical and moral, might include the whole 
procession of human disorders, led by dyspepsia and 
ending in madness — the awful Dumb Show of a world-his- 
toric tragedy. Take a large enough area of human life 
and all comedy melts into tragedy, like the Foohs part by 
the side of Lear. The chief scenes get filled with err- 
ing heroes, guileful usurpers, persecuted discoverers, dy- 
ing deliverers; everywhere the protagonist has a part preg- 
]iant with doom. The comedy sinks to an accessory, and 
if there are loud laughs they seem a convulsive transition 
from sobs; or if the comedy is touched with a gentle lov- 
ingness, the panoramic scene is one where 

‘ ‘ Sadness is a kind of mirth 
So mingled as if mirth did make us sad 
And sadness merry.” * 

But I did not set out on the wide survey that would carry 
me into tragedy, and, in fact, had nothing more serious 
in my mind than certain small chronic ailments that come 
of small authorship. I was thinking principally of Vorti- 
cella, who fiourished in my youth, not only as a portly lady 
walking in silk attire, but also as the authoress of a book 
entitled ^^The Channel Islands, with Notes and an Appen- 
dix. I would by no means make it a reproach to her that 
she wrote no more than one book; on the contrary, her 


* Two Noble Kinsmen. 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


Ill 


stopping there seems to me a laudable example. What one 
would have wished^ after experience, was that she had re- 
frained from producing even that single volume, and thus 
from giving her self-importance a troublesome kind of 
double incorporation which became oppressive to her ac- 
quaintances, and set up in herself one of those slight forms 
of disease to which I have just referred. She lived in the 
considerable provincial town of Pumpiter, which had its 
own newspaper press, with the usual divisions of political 
partisanship and the usual varieties of literary criticism — 
the florid and allusive, the staccato and peremptory, the 
clairvoyant and prophetic, the safe and pattern-phrased, or 
what one might call ^^the many-a-long-day style. 

Vorticella, being the wife of an important townsman, had 
naturally the satisfaction of seeing The Channel Islands 
reviewed by all the organs of Pumpiter opinion, and their 
articles or paragraphs held as naturally the opening pages 
in the elegantly bound album prepared by her for the re- 
ception of critical opinions. This ornamental volume 
lay on a special table in her drawing-room, close to the still 
more gorgeously bound work of which it was the signiflcant 
effect, and every guest was allowed the privilege of reading 
what had been said of the authoress and her work in the 

Pumpiter Gazette and Literary Watchman,^^ the ‘ ^ Pump- 
shire Post,^^ the Church Clock, the ^^Independent 
Monitor, and the lively but judicious publication known 
as the Medley Pie;^^ to be followed up, if he chose, by the 
instructive perusal of the strikingly confirmatory judg- 
ments, sometimes concurrent in the very phrases of jour- 
nals from the most distant counties; as the Latchgate 
Argus,^'’ the ^^Penllwy Universe, the Cockaleekie Ad- 
vertiser,^^ the • ^ Goodwin Sands Opinion, and the Landes 
End Times. 

I had friends in Pumpiter, and occasionally paid a long- 
visit there. When I called on Vorticella, who had a cousin- 
ship with my hosts, she had to excuse herself because a 
message claimed her attention for eight or ten minutes, and 
handing me the album of critical opinions, said, with a cer- 
tain emphasis which, considering my youth, was highly 
complimentary, that she would really like me to read what 
I should And there. This seemed a permissive politeness 
which I could not feel to be an oppression, and I ran my 
^yes over the dozen pages, each with a strip or islet of 


112 iMrKESSio:NS of Theophrastus such. 

newspaper in the center, with that freedom of mind (in my 
case meaning freedom to forget) which would be a perilous 
way of preparing for examination. This ad 
had its interest for me. The private truth being that I 
had not read the Channel Islands/^ I was amazed at the 
variety of matter which the volume must contain to have 
impressed these dilferent judges Avith the writer^s sur- 
passing capacity to handle almost all branches of inquiry 
and all forms of presentation. 

In Jersey she had shown herself a historian, in Guernsey 
a poetess, in Alderney a political economist, and in Sark a 
humorist; there Avere sketches of character scattered 
through the pages Avhich might put our fictionists^^ to 
the blush; the style Avas eloquent and racy, studded Avith 
gems of felicitous remark; and the moral spirit throughout 
Avas so superior that, said one, the recording angel 
(who is not supposed to take account of literature as such) 
would assuredly set down the Avork as a deed of religion. 
The force of this eulogy on the part of several reviewers 
was much heightened by the incidental evidence of their 
fastidious and severe taste, Avhich seemed to suffer consid- 
erably from the imperfections of our chief writers, even the 
dead and canonized; one afflicted them with the smell of 
oil; another lacked . erudition, and attempted (though 
vainly) to dazzle them with trivial conceits; one Avanted to 
be more philosophical than nature had made him; another, 
in attempting to be comic, produced the melancholy effect 
of a half-starved Merry-Andrew; while one and all, from 
the author of the Areopagitica doAvnAvard, had faults of 
style Avhich must have made an able hand in the Latch- 
gate Argus shake the many-glanced head belonging 
thereto with a smile of compassionate disapproval. Not so 
the authoress of ^^The Channel Islands Vorticella and 
Shakespeare were allowed to be faultless. I gathered that 
no blemishes were observable in the Avork of this accom- " 
plished Avriter, and the repeated information that she was 
second to none seemed after this superfluous. Her 
tliick octavo — notes, appendix, and all — was unflagging 
from beginning to end; and the Landes End Times, 
using a rather dangerous rhetorical figure, recommended 
you not to take up the volume unless you had leisure to- 
finish it at a sitting. It had given one writer more pleasure 
than he had had for many a long day — a sentence which 


IMPIIESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


113 


had a melancholy resonance, suggesting a life of studious 
languor such as all previous achievements of the human 
mind failed to stimulate into enjoyment. I think tJie col- 
lection of critical opinions wound up with this sentence, 
and I had turned back to look at the lithographed sketch 
of the authoress which fronted the first page of the album, 
when the fair original re-entered, and I laid down the vol- 
ume on its appropriate table. 

Well, what do you think of them?'’^ said Vorticella, 
with an emphasis which had some significance unperceived 
by me. I know you are a great student. Give me your 
opinion of these opinions. 

‘^They must be very gratifying to you,^'’ I answered, 
with a little confusion, for I perceived that I might easily 
mistake my footing, and I began to have a presentiment 
of an examination for which I was by no means crammed. 

On the whole — yes,^^ said Vorticella, in a tone of con- 
cession. few of the notices are written with some 

pains, but not one of them has really grappled with the 
chief idea in the appendix. I don^t know whether you have 
studied political economy, but you saw what I said on 
pag'C 398 about the Jersey fisheries?^^ 

I bowed — I confess it — with the mean hope that this 
movement in the nape of my neck would be taken as suffi- 
cient proof that I had read, marked, and learned. I do not 
forgive myself for this pantomimic falsehood, but I was 
young and morally timorous, and Vorticella^s personality 
had an effect on me something like that of a powerful nies- 
merizer when he directs all his ten fingers toward your eyes, 
as unpleasantly visible ducts for the invisible stream. I 
felt a great power of contempt in her, if I did not come up 
to her expectations. 

Well,^^ she resumed, you observe that not one of them 
has taken up that argument. But I hoj^e I convinced you 
about the drag-nets 

Here was a judgment on me. Orientally speaking, I had 
lifted up my foot on the steep descent of falsity, and was 
compelled to set it down on a lower level. I should think 
you must be right, said I, inwardly resolving that on the 
next topic I would tell the truth. 

“ I know that I am right, said Vorticella. The fact 
is that no critic in this town is fit to meddle with such sub- 
jects, unless it be Volvox, and he, with all his command of 


114 


I3rPRESSI0XS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


language^ is very superficial. It is Volvox who writes in 
the ^ Monitor. ^ I hope you noticed how he contradicts 
himself 

My resolution, helped by the equivalance of dangers, 
stoutly prevailed, and I said 

No! I am surprised. He is the only one who finds 
fault with me. He is a Dissenter, you know. The ^ Moni- 
tor ^ is the Dissenters^ organ, but my husband has been so 
useful to them in municipal affairs that they would not 
venture to run my book down; they feel obliged to tell 
the truth about me. Still Volvox betrays himself. After 
praising me for my penetration and accuracy, he presently 
says I have allowed myself to be imposed upon, and have 
let my active imagination run away with me. That is like 
his dissenting impertinence. Active my imagination may 
be, but I have it under control. Little Vibrio, who writes 
the playful notice in the ^ Medley Pie,^ has a clever hit at 
Volvox in that passage aboid: the steeple-chase of imagina- 
tion, where the loser wants to make it appear that the win- 
ner was only run away with. But if you did not notice 
Volvox^s self-contradiction you would not see the point, 
added Vorticella, with rather a chilling intonation. ^^Or 
perhaps you did not read the ^ Medley Pie ^ notice? That 
is a pity. Do take up the book again. Vibrio is a poor 
little tippling creature, but, as Mr. Carlyle would say, he 
has an eye, and he is always lively. 

I did take up the book again, and read as demanded. 

It is very ingenious, said I, really appreciating the 
difficulty of being lively in this connection; it seemed even 
more wonderful than that a Vibrio should have an eye. 

You are probably surprised to see no notices from the 
London press, said Vorticella. I have one — a very re- 
markable one. But I reserve it until the others have spoken; 
and then I shall introduce it to wind up. I shall have them 
reprinted, of course, and inserted in future copies. This 
from the Candelabrum^ is only eight lines in length, but 
full of venom. It calls my style dull and pompous. I 
think that will tell its own tale, placed after the other 
critiques. 

People^s impressions are so different, said I. 8ome 
persons find ^ Don Quixote ^ dull.^^ 

Yes,^^ said Vorticella, in emphatic chest tones, dull- 
ness is a matter of opinion; but pompous! That I never 


IMPKESSIOlSrS OF THEOPHliASTUS SUCH. 


115 


was and never could be. Perhaps he means that my matter 
is too important lor his taste; and I have no objection to 
that, I did not intend to be trivial. I should just like to 
read you that passage about the drag-nets^ because I could 
make it clearer to you. 

A second (less ornamental) copy was at her elbow and was 
already opened, when to my great relief another guest was 
announced, and I was able to take my leave without seem- 
ing to run away from ^^The Channel Islands, though not 
without being compelled to carry with me the loan of ^^the 
marked copy,^^ which I was to find advantageous in a re- 
perusal of the appendix and was only requested to return 
before my departure from Pumpiter. Looking into the 
volume now with some curiosity, I found it a very ordinary 
combination of the commonplace and ambitious, one of 
those books which one might imagine to have been Avritten 
under the old Grub Street coercion of hunger and thirst, if 
they were not known beforehand to be the gratuitous pro- 
duction of ladies and gentlemen whose circumstances might 
be called altogether easy, but for an uneasy vanity that 
happened to have been directed toward authorship. Its 
importance was that of a polypus, tumor fungus, or other 
erratic outgrowth, noxious and disfiguring in its effect on 
the individual organism Avhich nourishes it. Poor Vorti- 
cella might not have been more wearisome on a visit than 
the majority of her neighbors, but for this disease of mag- 
nified self-importance belonging to small authorship. I 
understand that the chronic complaint of The Channel 
Islands never left her. As the years went on and the 
publication tended to vanish in the distance for her neigh- 
bors^ memory, she Avas still bent on dragging it to the fore- 
ground, and her chief interest in neAv acquaintances Avas the 
possibility of lending them her book and entering into all 
details concerning it, and requesting them to read her al- 
bum of critical opinions. This really made her more 
tiresome than Gregarina, whose distinction was that she 
had had cholera, and who did not feel herself in her true 
position Avith strangers until they knew it. 

My experience with Vorticella led me for a time into the 
false supposition that this sort of fungus disfiguration, 
Avhich makes Self disagreeably larger, Avas most common to 
the female sex; but I presently found that here too the 
male could assert his superiority and show a more vigorous 


116 


IMPRESSIONS. OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


boredom. I have known a man with a single pamphlet 
CQiitaining an assurance that somebody else was wrong, to- 
gether with a few approved quotations, produce a more 
powerful effect of shuddering at his approach than ever 
Vorticella did with her varied octavo volume, including 
notes and appendix. Males of more than one nation recur 
to my memory who produced from their pocket on the 
slightest encouragement a small pink or buff duodecimo 
pamphlet, wrapped in silver paper, as a present held ready 
for an intelligent reader. A mode of propagandism,^^ 
you remark in excuse; they wished to spread some useful 
corrective doctrine . 'Not necessarily: the indoctrination 
aimed at was perhaps to convince you of their own talents 
by the sample of an Ode on Shakespeare^s Birthday, or 
a translation from Horace. 

Vorticella may pair off with Monas, who had also writ- 
ten his one book — Here and There; or, A Trip from 
Truro to Transylvania^^ — and not only carried it in his 
portmanteau when he went on visits, but he took the earli- 
est opportunity of depositing it in the drawing-room, and 
afterward would enter to look for it, as if under pressure 
of a need for reference, begging the lady of the house to 
tell him whether she had seen a small volume bound in 
red.^^ One hostess at last ordered it to be carried into his 
bedroom to save his time; but it presently reappeared in 
his hands, and was again left with inserted slips of paper 
on the drawing-room table. 

Depend upon it, vanity is human, native alike to men 
and women; only in the male it is of denser texture, less 
volatile, so that it less immediately informs you of its pres- 
ence, but is more massive and capable of knocking you down 
if you come into collision with it; while in women vanity 
lays by its small revenges as in a needle-case always at hand. 
The difference is in muscle and finger-tips, in traditional 
habits and mental perspective, rather in the original aiipe- 
tite of vanity. It is an approved method now to explain 
ourselves by a reference to the races as little like us as pos- 
sible, which leads me to observe that in Fiji the men use 
the most elaborate hair-dressing; and that wherever tattoo- 
ing is in vogue, the male expects to carry off the prize of 
admiration for pattern and workmanship. Arguing ana- 
logically, and looking for this tendency of the Fijian or 
Hawaiian male in the eminent European, we must suppose 


IMPEESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


117 * 


that it exhibits itself under the forms of civilized api3arel ; 
and it would be a great mistake to estimate passionate elfort 
hy the effect it produces on our perception or understand- 
ing. It is conceivable that a man may have concentrated no 
less will and expectation on his wristbands, gaiters, and the 
shape of his hat-brim, or an appearance which imjiresses 
you as that of the modern ^^swelV^ than the Ojibbeway on 
an ornamentation which seems to us much more elaborate. 
In what concerns the search for admiration at least, it is 
not true that the effect is equal to the cause and resembles 
it. The cause of a flat curl on the masculine forehead, 
such as might be seen when George the Fourth was king, 
must have been widely different in quality and intensity 
from the impression made by that small scroll of hair on 
the organ of the beholder. Merely to maintain an attitude 
and gait which I notice in certain club men, and especially 
an inflation of the chest accompanying very small remarks, 
there goes, I am convinced, an expenditure of psychical 
energy little appreciated by the multitude — a mental vision 
of Self, and deeply impressed beholders, which is quite 
Avithout antitype in Avhat we call the effect 23roduced by 
that hidden process. 

No! there is no need to admit that Avomen Avould carry 
away the prize of vanity in a competition where differences 
of custom were fairly considered. A man can not shoAvliis 
vanity in a tight skirt which forces him to walk sideAvays 
doAvn the staircase; but let the match be betAveen the re- 
spective vanities of largest beard and tightest skirt, and 
here too the battle Avould be to the strong. 


XVI. 

MORAL SAAHHDLERS. 

It is a familiar example of irony in the degradation of 
Avords that Avhat a man^s Avorth has come to mean hoAv 
much money he possesses; but there seems a deeper and 
more melancholy irony in the shrunken meaning that j)opu- 
lar or polite speech assigns to morality ^^and morals. 
The poor part these Avords are made to play recalls the fate 
of those pagan divinities Avho, after being understood to 
rule the poAvers of the air and the destinies of men, came 


118 IMPKESSIOXS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

down to the level of insignificant demons, or were even 
made a farcical show for the amusement of the multitude. 

Talking to Melissa in a time of commercial trouble, I 
found her disposed to speak pathetically of the disgrace 
which had fallen on Sir Gavial Mantrap, because of his 
conduct in relation to the Eocene Mines, and to other com- 
panies ingeniously devised by him for the punishment of 
ignorance in people of small means: a disgrace by which 
the poor titled gentleman was actually reduced to live in 
comparative obscurity on his wife^s settlement of one or two 
hundred thousand in the consols. 

Surely your pity is misapplied,'’^ said I, rather dubi- 
ously; for I like the comfort of trusting that a correct 
moral judgment is the strong point in woman (seeing 
that she has a majority of about a million in our islands), 
and I imagined that Melissa might have some unexpressed 
grounds for her opinion. I should have thought you 
would rather be sorry for Mantrap^s victims — the widows, 
sj)insters, and hard-working fathers whom his unscrupulous 
haste to make himself rich has cheated of all their savings, 
while he is eating well, lying softly, and after impudently 
justifying himself before the public, is perhaps joining in 
the General Confession with a sense that he is an acceptable 
object in the sight of God, though decent men refuse to 
meet him. 

Oh, all that about the companies, I knoAV, was most 
unfortunate. In commerce people are led to do so many 
things, and he might not know exactly how everything 
would turn out. But Sir Gavial made a good use of his 
money, and he is a thoroughly moral man.^^ 

‘‘ What do you mean by a thoroughly moral man?^^ 
said I. 

Oh, I suppose every one means the same by that,^^ 
said Melissa, with a slight air of rebuke. Sir Gavial is 
an excellent family man — quite blameless there; and so 
charitable round his place at Tiptop. Very different from 
Mr. l^arabbas, whose life, my husband tells me, is most ob- 
jectionable, with actresses and that sort of thing. I think 
a man^s morals should make a difference to us. I^m not 
sorry for Mr. Barabbas, but I am sorry for Sir Gavial Man- 
trap. 

I will not repeat my answer to Melissa, for I fear it was 
offensively brusque, my opinion being that Sir Gavial was 


IMPKESSIONS OF THEOPHRAvSTUS SUCH. 


119 


the most pernicious scoundrel of the twO;, since his name for 
virtue served as an effective part of a swindling apparatus; 
and perhaps I hinted that to call such a man moral showed 
rather a silly notion of human affairs. In fact^ I had an 
angry wish to be instructive, and Melissa, as will sometimes 
happen, noticed my anger without appropriating my in- 
struction; for I have since heard that she speaks of me as 
rather violent-tempered, and not overstrict in my views of 
morality. 

I wish that this narrow use of words which are wanted in 
their full meaning were confined to women like Melissa. 
Seeing that Morality and Morals under their alias of Ethics 
are the subject of voluminous discussion, and their true 
basis a pressing matter of dispute — seeing that the most 
famous book ever- written upon Ethics, and forming a chief 
study in our colleges, allies ethical with political science or 
that which treats of the constitution and prosperity of States, 
one might expect that educated men would find reason to 
avoid a perversion of language which lends itself to no wider 
view of life than that of village gossips. Yet I find even 
respectable historians of our own and of foreign countries, 
after showing that a king was treacherous, rapacious, and 
ready to sanction gross breaches in the administration of 
justice, end by praising him for his pure moral character, 
by which one must suppose them to mean that he was not 
lewd nor debauched, not even the European twin of the typ- 
ical Indian potentate whom Macaulay describes as passing 
his life in chewing bang and fondling dancing-girls. And 
since we are sometimes told of such maleficent kings that 
they were religious, we arrive at the curious result that the 
most serious wide-reaching duties of man lie quite outside 
both Morality and Keligion — the one of these consisting in 
not keeping mistresses (and perhaps not drinking too 
much), and the other in certain ritual and spiritual tran- 
sactions with God which can be carried on equally well side 
by side with the basest conduct toward men. With such a 
classification as this, it is no wonder, considering the strong 
reaction of language on thought, that many minds, dizzy 
with indigestion of recent science and philosophy, are far 
to seek for the grounds of social duty, and without enter- 
taining any private intention of committing a perjury which 
would ruin an innocent man, or seeking gain by supplying 
bad preserved meats to our navy, feel themselves specu- 


1*^0 IMPRESSIOXS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

latively obliged to inquire wliy they should not do so. and 
are inclined to measure their intellectual subtlety by their 
dissatisfaction with all answers to this Why?^’ It is of 
little use to theoiize in ethics while our habitual phraseology 
stamps the larger part of our social duties as something 
that lies aloof from the deepest needs and affections of our 
nature. The informal definitions of popular language are 
the only medium tlirough which theory really afiects the 
mass of minds even among the nominally educated; and 
when a man whose business hours^, the solid part of every 
day^ are spent in an unscrupulous course of public or pri- 
vate action which has every calculable chance of causing 
wide-spread injiny and misery, can be called moral because 
he comes home to dine with his wife and children and cher- 
ishes the hap]3iness of his own hearth, the augury is not 
good for the use of high ethical and theological disputation 
Not for one moment would one willingly lose sight of the 
truth that the relation of the sexes and the primary ties of 
kinship are the deepest roots of human well-being, but to 
make them by themselves the equivalent of morality is ver- 
bally to cut off the channels of feeling through which tliey 
are the feeders of that well-being. They are the original 
fountains of a sensibility to the claims of others, which is 
the bond of societies; but being necessarily in the first in- 
stance a private good, there is always the danger that in- 
dividual selfishness will seem in them only the best part of 
its own gain; just as knowledge, navigation, commerce, 
and all the conditions which are of a nature to awaken 
men^s consciousness of their mutual dependence and to 
make the world one great society, are the occasions of selfish, 
unfair action, of war and oppression, so long as the public 
conscience or chief force of feeling and opinion is not uni- 
form and strong enough in its insistance on what is de- 
manded by the general welfare. And among the influences 
that must retard a right public judgment, the degradation 
of words which involve praise and Wame will be reckoned 
worth protesting against by every mature observer. To 
rob words of half their meaning, while they retain their 
dignity as qualifications, is like allowing to men who have 
lost half their faculties the same high and perilous com- 
mand which they won in their time of vigor; or like selling 
foods and seeds after fraudulently abstracting their best 
virtues; in each case wliat ought to be beneficially strong is 


IMPEESSIOKS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. ‘ 121 

fatally enfeebled, if not empoisoned. Until we have al- 
tered our dictionaries, and have found some other word 
than morality to stand in popular use for the duties of man 
to man, let us refuse to accept as moral the contractor who 
enriches himself by using large machinery to make paste- 
board soles pass as leather for the feet of unhappy con- 
scripts fighting at miserable odds against invaders: let us 
rather call him a miscreant, though he were the tenderest, 
most faithful of husbands, and contend that his own ex- 
perience of home happiness makes his reckless infliction of 
suft'ering on others all the more atrocious'. Let us refuse to 
accept as moral any political leader who should allow his 
conduct in relation to great issues to be determined by ego- 
istic passion, and boldly say that he would be less immoral, 
even though he were as lax in his personal habits as Sir 
Kobert Walpole, if at the same time his sense of the public 
welfare were supreme in his mind, quelling all pettier im- 
pulses beneath a magnanimous impartiality. And though 
we were to And among that class of journalists who live by 
recklessly reporting injurious rumors, insinuating the black- 
est motives in opponents, descanting at large, and with an 
air of infallibility, on dreams which they both find and in- 
terpret, and stimulating bad feeling between nations by 
abusive writing, which is as empty of real conviction as the 
rage of a pantomime king, and would be ludicrous if its 
effects did not make it appear diabolical — though we were 
to find among these a man who was benignancy itself in his 
own circle, a healer of private differences, a soother in pri- 
vate calamities, let us pronounce him, nevertheless, flag- 
rantly immoral, a root of hideous cancer in the common- 
wealth, turning the channels of instruction into feeders of 
social and political disease. 

In opposite ways one sees bad effects likely to be encour- 
aged by this narrow, use of the word morals , shutting out 
from its meaning half those actions of a man^s life which 
tell momentously on the well-being of his fellow-citizens, 
and on the preparation of a future for the children growing 
up around him. Thoroughness of workmanship, care in 
the execution of every task undertaken, as if it were the 
acceptance of a trust which it would be a breach of faith 
not to discharge well, is a form of duty so momentous tl at 
if it were to die out from the feeling and practice of a 
people all reforms of institutions would be helpless to ere- 


122 IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

ate national prosperity and national happiness. Do we de- 
sire to see public spirit penetrating all classes of the com- 
munity and affecting every man^s conduct, so that he shall 
make neither the saving of his soul nor any other private 
saving an excuse for indifference to the general welfare? 
AVell and good. But the sort of public spirit that scamps 
its bread-winning work, whether with the trowel, the pen, 
or the overseeing brain, that it may hurry to scenes of 
political or social agitation, would be as baleful a gift to 
our people as any malignant demon could devise. One best 
part of educational training is that which comes through 
special knowledge and manipulative or other skill, with its 
usual accompaniment of delight, in relation to work which 
is the daily bread-winning occupation — which is a man^s 
contribution to the effective wealth of society in return for 
what he takes as his own share. But this duty of doing 
one^s proper work well, and taking care that every product 
of one^s labor shall be genuinely what it pretends to be, is 
not only left out of morals in popular speech; it is very little 
insisted on by public teachers, at least in the only effective 
way — by tracing the continuous effects of ill-done work. 
Some of them seem to be still hopeful that it will follow as 
a necessary consequence from week-day services, ecclesi- 
astical decoration, and improved hymn-books; others ap- 
2)arently trust to descanting on self-culture in general, or 
to raising a general sense of faulty circumstances; and 
meanwhile lax, makeshift work, from the high conspicuous 
kind to the average and obscure, is allowed to pass un- 
stamped with the disgrace of immorality, though there is 
not a member of society who is .not daily suffering from it 
materially and spiritually, and though it is the fatal cause 
that must degrade our national rank and our commerce, in 
spite of all open markets and discovery of available coal ^ 
seams. 

I suppose one may take the popular misuse of the words 
Morality ancTMorals as some excuse for certain absurdities 
which are occasional fashions in speech and writing — cer- 
tain old lay-figures, as ugly as the queerest Asiatic idol, 
which, at different periods, get propped into loftiness, and 
attired in magnificent Venetian drapery, so that whether 
they have a human face or not is of little consequence. 
One is, the notion that there is a radical, irreconcilable op- 
position between intellect and morality. I do not mean 


IMPEESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 123 

the simple statement of fact, which everybody knows, that 
remarkably able men have had very faulty morality, and 
have outraged public feeling even at its ordinary standard ; 
but the supposition that the ablest intellect, the highest 
genius, will see through morality as a sort of twaddle for 
bibs and tuckers, a doctrine of dullness, a mere incident in 
human stupidity. We begin to understand the acceptance 
of this foolishness by considering that we live in a society 
where we may hear a treacherous monarch, or a malignant 
and lying politician, or a man who uses either official or 
literary power as an instrument of his private partiality or 
hatred, or a manufacturer who devises the falsification of 
wares, or a trader who deals in virtueless seed-grains, 
praised or compassionated because of his excellent morals. 
Clearly, if morality meant no more than such decencies as 
are practiced by these poisonous members of society, it 
would be possible to say, without suspicion of light-headed- 
ness, that morality lay aloof from the grand stream of 
human affairs, as a small channel fed by the stream and 
not missed from it. While this form of nonsense is con- 
veyed in the popular use of words, there must be plenty of 
well-dressed ignorance at leisure to run through a box of 
books, which will feel itself initiated in the freemasonry of 
intellect by a view of life which might take for a Shake- 
spearean motto: 

“ Fair is foul and foul is fair, 

Hover through the fog and filthy air ” — 

and will find itself easily provided with striking conversa- 
tion by the rule of reversing all the judgments on good and 
evil which have come to be the calendar and clock-work of 
society. But let our habitual talk give morals their full 
meaning as the conduct which, in every human relation, 
would follow from the fullest knowledge and the fullest 
sympathy — a meaning perpetually corrected and enriched 
by a more thorough appreciation of dependence in things, 
and a finer sensibility to both physical and spiritual fact — 
and this ridiculous ascription of superlative powers to minds 
which have no effective, awe-inspiring vision of the human 
lot, no response of understanding to the connection be- 
tween duty and the material processes by which the world 
is kept habitable for cultivated man, will be tacitly discred- 
ited without any need to cite the immortal names that all 


1*^4 IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

are obliged to take as the measure of intellectual rank and 
highly-charged genius. 

Suppose a Frenchman — I mean no disrespect to the great 
French nation^ for all nations are afflicted with their pecul- 
iar parasitic growths, which are lazy, hungry forms, usu- 
ally characterized by a disproportionate swallowing appara- 
tus: suppose a Parisian who should shuffle down the Boule- 
vard with a soul ignorant of the gravest cares and the 
deepest tenderness of manhood, and a frame more or less 
fevered by debauchery, mentally polishing into utmost re- 
finement of phrase and rhythm verses which were an en- 
largement on the Shakspearean motto, and worthy of the 
most expensive title to be furnished by the venders of such 
antithetic ware as Les marguerites de PEnfer or Les 
delices de Beelzebutb. This supposed personage might 
probably enough regard his negation of those moral sensi- 
bilities which make half the warp and woof of human his- 
tory, his indifference to the hard thinking and haj’d handi- 
work of life, to which he ow^ed even his own gauzy mental 
garments with their spangles of paradox, as the royalty of 
genius, for we are used to witness such self-crowning in 
many forms of mental alienation; but he would not, I 
think, be taken, even by his own generation, as a living 
proof that there can exist such a combination as that of 
moral stupidity and trivial emphasis of personal indulgence 
with the large yet finely discriminating vision which marks 
the intellectual masters of our kind. Doubtless there are 
many sorts of transfiguration, and a man who has come to 
be worthy of all gratitude and reverence may have had his 
swinish period, wallowing in ugly places; but suppose it 
had been handed down to us that Sophocles or Virgil had 
at oije time made himself scandalous in this way: the works 
which have consecrated their memory for our admiration 
and gratitude are not a glorifying of swinishness, but an 
artistic incorporation of the highest sentiment known to 
their age. 

All these may seem to be wide reasons for objecting to 
Melissa^’s pity for Sir Gavial Mantrap on the ground of 
his good morals; but their connection will not be obscure 
to any one who has taken pains to observe the links unit- 
ing the scattered signs of our social development. 


IMPEESSIONS OF THEOPHEASTUS SUCH. 


1^5 


XVIL 

SHADOWS OF THE COMIKG KACE. 

My friend Trost, who is no optimist as to the state of the 
universe hitherto, but is confident that at soifie future pe- 
riod within the duration of the solar system ours will be the 
best of all possible worlds — a hope which I always honor 
as a sign of beneficent qualities — my friend Trost always 
tries to keep up my spirits under the sight of the extremely 
unpleasant and disfiguring work by which many of our 
fellow-creatures have to get their bread, with the assurance 
that ^^all this will soon be done by machinery/^ But he 
sometimes neutralizes the consolation by extending it over 
so large an area of human labor, and insisting so impress- 
ively on the quantity of energy which will thus be set free 
for loftier purposes, that I am tempted to desire an occa- 
sional famine of invention in the coming ages, lest the 
humbler kinds of work should be entirely nullified while 
there are still left some men and women who are not fit 
for the highest. 

Especially, when one considers the perfunctory way in 
which some of the most exalted tasks are already executed 
by those who are understood to be educated for them, 
there rises a fearful vision of the human race evolving 
machinery which will by and by throw itself fatally out of 
work. When, in the Bank of England, I see a wondrously 
delicate machine for testing sovereigns, a shrewd implacable 
little steel Ehadamanthus that, once the coins are delivered 
up to it, lifts and balances each in turn for the fraction of 
an instant, finds it wanting or sufficient, and dismisses it to 
right or left with rigorous justice; when I am told of the 
micrometers and thermopiles and tasi meters which deal 
physically with the invisible, the impalpable, and the un- 
imaginable; of cunning wires and wheels and pointing 
needles which will register your and my quickness so as to 
exclude flattering opinion; of a machine for drawing the 
right conclusion, which will doubtless by and by be im- 
proved into an automaton for finding true premises; of a 
microphone which detects the cadence of the fly^s foot on 
the ceiling, and may be expected to discriminate the noises 


126 IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

of our various follies as they soliloquize or converse in our 
brains — my mind seeming too small for these things, I get 
a little out of it, like an unfortunate savage too suddenly 
brought face to face wifch civilization, and I exclaim : 

Am I already in the shadow of the Coming Eace, and 
will the creatures who are to transcend and finally supersede 
us be steely organisms, giving out the effluvia of the labora- 
tory, and performing with infallible exactness more than 
everything that we have performed with a slovenly approxi- 
mativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?’^ 

But, says Trost, treating me with cautious mildness 
on hearing me vent this raving notion, you forget that 
these wonder-workers are the slaves of our race, need our 
tendance and regulation, obey the mandates of our con- 
sciousness, and are only deaf and dumb bringers of reports 
which we decipher and make use of. They are simply ex- 
tensions of the human organism, so to speak, limbs im- 
measurably more powerful, ever more subtle finger-tips, 
ever more mastery over the invisibly great and the invisibly 
small. Each new machine needs a new appliance of human 
skill to construct it, new devices to feed it with material, 
and often keener-edged faculties to note its registrations or 
performances. How then can machines supersede us? — 
they depend upon us. When we cease, they cease. 

I am not so sure of that,^^ said I, getting back into my 
mind, and becoming rather willful in consequence. ^^If, as 
I have heard you contend, machines as they are more and 
more perfected will require less and less of tendance, how 
do I know that they may not be ultimately made to carry, 
or may not in themselves evolve, conditions of self-supply, 
self-repair, and reproduction, and not only do all the mighty 
and subtle work possible on this planet better than we could 
do it, but with the immense advantage of banishing from 
the earth^s atmosphere screaming consciousnesses which, 
in our comparatively clumsy race, make an intolerable 
noise and fuss to each other about every petty ant-like per- 
formance, looking on at all work only as it were to spring a 
rattle here or blow a trumpet there, with a ridiculous sense 
of being effective. I, for my part, can not see any reason 
why a sufficiently penetrating thinker, who can see his way 
through a thousand years or so, should not conceive a par- 
liament of machines, in which the manners were excellent 
and tlie motions infallible in logic; one honorable instru- 


IMPRESSIOiirS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 127 

ment, a remote descendant of the Voltaic family, might 
discharge a powerful current (entirely without animosity) 
on an honorable instrument opposite, of more upstart origin, 
but belonging to the ancient edge-tool race which we al- 
ready at Sheffield see paring thick iron as if it were mellow 
cheese — by this unerringly directed discharge operating on 
movements corresponding to what we call Estimates, and 
by necessary mechanical consequence on movements corre- 
sponding to what we call the Funds, which, with a vain 
analogy, we sometimes speak of as ^ sensitive.^ For every 
machine would be perfectly educated; that is to say, would 
have the suitable molecular adjustments, which would act 
not the less infallibly for being free from the fussy accom- 
paniment of that consciousness to which our prejudice gives 
a supreme governing rank, when in truth it is an idle para- 
site on the grand sequence of things/^ 

Nothing of the sort returned Trost, getting angry, 
and judging it kind to treat me with some severity; ^^what 
you have heard me say is, that our race will and must act 
as a nervous center to the utmost development of mechan- 
ical processes: the subtly refined powers of machines will 
react in producing more subtly refined thinking processes 
which will occupy the minds set free from grosser labor. 
Say, for example, that all the scavengers^ work of London 
were done, so far as human attention is concerned, by the 
occasional pressure of a brass button (as in the ringing of 
an electric bell), you will then have a multitude of brains 
set free from the exquisite enjoyment of dealing with the ex- 
act sequences and high speculations supplied and prompted 
by the delicate machines which yield a response to the fixed 
stars, and give readings of the spiral vortices fundamentally 
concerned in the production of epic poems or great judicial 
harangues. So far from mankind being thrown out of 
work, according to our notion, continued Trost, with a 
peculiar nasal note of scorn, if it were not for your in- 
curable dilettanteism in science as in all other things — if 
you had once understood the action of any delicate machine — 
vou would perceive that the sequence it carries throughout 
the realm of phenomena would require many generations, 

’ perhaps eons, of understandings considerably stronger than 
yours, to exhaust the store of work it lays open.^^ 

Precisely, said I, with a meekness which I felt was 
praiseworthy; it is the feebleness of my capacity, bring- 


128 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


ing me nearer tliaii you to the human average^ that per- 
haps enables me to imagine certain results better than you 
can. Doubtless the very fishes of our riverS;, gullible as 
they look, and slow as they are to be rightly convinced in 
another order of facts, form fewer false expectations about 
each other than we should form about them if we were in 
a position of somewhat fuller intercourse with their species; 
for even as it is we have continually to be surprised that 
they do not rise to our carefully selected bait. Take me 
then as a sort of reflective and experienced carp; but do 
not estimate the justice of my ideas by my facial expres- 
sion. 

Pooh!^^ says Trost. (We are on very intimate terms.) 

Xatu rally, I persisted, ^^it is less easy to you than to 
me to imagine our race transcended and superseded, since 
the more energy a being is possessed of, the harder it must 
be for him to conceive his own death. But I, from the 
point of view of a reflective carp, can easily imagine myself 
and my congeners dispensed with in the frame of things, 
and giving way not only to a superior but a vastly different 
kind of Entity. What I would ask you is, to show me 
why, since each new invention casts a new light along the 
pathway of discoveiy, and each new combination or struct- 
ure brings into play more conditions than its inventor fore- 
saw, there should not at length be a machine of such high 
mechanical and chemical powers that it would find and as- 
similate the material to supply its own waste, and then, by 
a further evolution of internal molecular movements, re- 
produce itself by some process of fission or budding. This 
last stage having been reached, either by man^s contrivance 
or as an unforeseen result, one sees that the process of 
natural selection must drive men altogether out of the 
field; for they will long before have begun to sink into -the 
miserable condition of those unhappy characters in fable 
who, having demons or djinns at their beck, and being 
obliged tb^ supply them with work, found too much of 
everything done in too short a time. What demons so po- 
tent as molecular movement, none the less tremendously 
potent for not carrying the futile cargo of a consciousness 
screeching irrelevantly, like a fowl tied head downmost to 
the saddle of a swift horseman? Under such uncomfortable 
circumstances our race will have diminished with the di- 
minishing call on their energies, and by the time that the 


IMPKESSIONS OF THEOPHKASTUS SUCH. 


129 


self -repairing and reproducing machines arise^, all but a few 
of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have 
become pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other de- 
generation, and behold around them a scanty hydroceph- 
alous offspring. As to the breed of the ingenious and 
intellectual, cheir nervous systems will at last have been 
overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the 
immensely more powerful unconscious race, and they will 
naturally, as the less energetic combinations of movement, 
subside like the flame of a candle in the sunlight, ddius 
the feebler race, whose corporeal adjustments happened to 
be accompanied with a maniacal consciousness which im- 
agined itself moving its mover, will have vanished, as all 
less adapted existences do before the fittest — ^.6., the exist- 
ence composed of the most j^crsistent groups of movements 
and the most capable of incorporating new groups in har- 
monious relation. Who — if our consciousness is, as I have 
been given to understand, a mere stumbling of our organ- 
isms on their way to unconscious perfection — who shall say 
that those fittest existences will not be found along the 
track of what we call inorganic combinations, which will 
carry on the most elaborate processes as mutely and jDain- 
lessly as we are now told that the minerals are metamor- 
phosing themselves Continually in the dark laboratoiy of 
the earth^s crust? Thus this planet may be filled with be- 
ings who will be blind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will 
execute changes as delicate and complicated as those of 
human language and all the intricate v/eb of what we call 
its effects, without sensitive impression, without sensitive 
impulse; there may be, let us say, mute orations, mute 
rhapsodies, mute discussions, and no consciousness there 
even to enjoy the silence. 

Absurd grumbled Trost. 

The supposition is logical, said I. It is well argued 
from the j)remises. 

Whose premises?^^ cried Trost, turning on me with 
some fierceness. You don^t mean to call them mine, I 
hope?"'’ 

Heaven forbid! They seem to be flying about in the 
air with other germs, and have found" a sort of nidus 
among my melancholy fancies. Nobody really holds them. 
They bear the same relation to real belief as walking on 

5 . 


130 


IMPKESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


the head for a show does to running away from an explo- 
sion or walking fast to catch the train. 


XVIII. 

THE MODERH HEP! HEP! HEp! 

To discern likeness amidst diversity^ it is well known, 
does not require so fine a mental edge as the discerning of 
diversity amidst general sameness. The piimary rough 
classification depends on the. prominent resemblances of 
things: the progress is toward finer and finer discrimination 
according to minute differences. 

Yet even at this stage of European culture one^s atten- 
tion is continually drawn to the prevalence of that grosser 
sloth which makes people dull to the most ordinary prompt- 
ing of comparison — the bringing things together because 
of their likeness. The same motives, the same ideas, the 
same practices, are alternately admired and abhorred, 
lauded and denounced, according to their association with 
superficial differences, historical or actually social: even 
learned writers treating of the great subjects often show an 
attitude of mind not greatly superior in its logic to that of 
the frivolous fine lady who is indignant at the frivolity of 
her maid. 

To take only the subject of the Jews: it would be diffi- 
cult to find a form of bad reasoning about them which has 
not been heard in conversation or been admitted to the 
dignity of print; but the neglect of resemblances is a com- 
mon property of dullness which unites all the various points 
of view — the prejudiced, the puerile, the spiteful, and the 
abysmally ignorant. 

That the preservation of national memories is an element 
and a meaj:^ of national greatness, that their revival is a 
sign of reviving nationality, that every heroic defender, 
every patriotic restorer, has been inspired by such memo- 
ries, and has made them his watchword, that even such a 
corporate existence as that of a Eoman legion or an English 
regiment has been made valorous by memorial standards — 
these are the glorious commonplaces of historic teaching at 
our public schools and universities, being happily ingrained 
in Greek and Latin classics. They have also been im- 


IMPKESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


131 


pressed on the world by conspicuous modern instances. 
That there is a free modern Greece is due — through all in- 
filtration of other than Greek blood — to the presence of 
ancient Greece in the consciousness of European men; and 
every speaker would feel his point safe if he were to praise 
Byron^s devotion to a cause made glorious by ideal identifi- 
cation with the past; hardly so, if he were to insist that the 
Greeks were not to be helped further because their history 
shows that they were anciently unsurpassed in treachery 
and lying, and that many modern Greeks are highly dis- 
reputable characters, while others are disposed to grasp too 
large a share of our commerce. The same with It^aly: the 
pathos of his country's lot pierced the youthful soul of 
Mazzini, because, like Banter’s, his blood was fraught with 
the kinship of Italian greatness, his imagination filled with 
a majestic past that wrought itself into a majestic future. 
Half a century ago, what was Italy? An idling-place of 
dilettanteism or of itinerant motiveless wealth, a territory 
parcelled out for papal sustenance, dynastic convenience, 
and the profit of an alien govern'ment. What were the 
Italians? No people, no voice in European counsels, no 
massive power in European affairs : a race thought of in 
English and French society as chiefly adapted to the op- 
eratic stage, or to serve as models for painters; disposed to 
smile gratefully at the reception of half-pence; and by the 
more historical remembered to be rather polite than truth- 
ful, in all probability a combination of Machiavelli, Kubini, 
and Masaniello. Thanks chiefly to the divine gift of a 
memory which inspires the moments with a past, a pres- 
ent, and a future, and gives the sense of corporate existence 
that raises man above the otherwise more respectable and 
innocent brute, all that, or most of it, is changed. 

Again, one of our living historians finds just sympathy 
in his vigorous insistance on our true ancestry, on our being 
the strongly marked heritors in language and genius of 
those old English seamen who, beholding a rich country 
with a most convenient seaboard, came, doubtless with a 
sense of divine warrant, and settled themselves on this or 
the other side of fertilizing streams, gradually conquering 
more and more of the pleasant land from the natives who 
knew nothing of Odin, and/finally making unusually clean 
work in ridding themselves of those prior occupants. Let 
us, he virtually says — let us know who were our fore- 


132 


IMPKESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


fathers, who it was that won the soil for ns, and brought 
the good seed of those institutions through which we should 
not arrogantly but gratefully feel ourselves distinguished 
among the nations as possessors of long-inherited freedom ; 
let us not keep up an ignorant kind of naming which dis- 
guises our true affinities of blood and language, but let us 
see thoroughly what sort of notions and traditions our fore- 
fathers had, and what sort of song inspired them. Let the 
poetic fragments which breathe forth their fierce bravery 
in battle, and their trust in fierce gods who help tliem, be 
treasured with atfectionate reverence. These seafaring, in- 
vading, self -asserting men were the English of old time, 
and were our fathers who did rough work by which we are 
profiting. They had virtues which incorporated themselves 
in wholesome usages to which we trace our own political 
blessings. Let us know and acknowledge our common re- 
lationship to them, and be thankful that over and above 
the affections and duties which spring from our manhood, 
we have the closer and more constantly guiding duties which 
belong to us as Englishmen. 

To this view of our nationality most persons who have 
feeling and understanding enough to be conscious of the 
connection between the patriotic affection and every other 
affection which lifts us above emigrating rats and free-lov- 
ing baboons, will be disposed to say Amen. True, we are 
not indebted to those ancestors for our religioii: we are 
rather proud of having got that illumination from else- 
where. The men who planted our nation were not Chris- 
tians, though they began their work centuries after Christ; 
and they h^ a decided objection to Christianity when it was 
first proposed to them : they were not monotheists, and their 
religion was the reverse of spiritual. But since we have 
been fortunate enough to keep the island-home they won 
for us, and have been on the whole a prosperous people, 
rather contiuuing the plan of invading and spoiling other 
lands thanTbeing forced to beg for shelter in them, nobody 
has reproached us because our fathers thirteen hundred 
years ago worshiped Odin, massacred Britons, and were with 
difficulty persuaded to accept Christianity, knowing nothing 
of Hebrew history and the reasons why Christ should be re- 
ceived as the Saviour of mankind. The Eed Indians, not 
liking us when we settled among them, might have been 
willing to fling such facts in our faces, but they were too 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


133 


ignorant, and, besides, their opinions did not signify, be- 
cause we were able, if we liked, to exterminate them. The 
Hindoos also have doubtldss had their rancors against us, 
and still entertain enough ill-will to make unfavorable re- 
marks on our character, especially as to our historic rapacity 
and arrogant notions of our own superiority; they perhaps 
do not admire the usual English profile, and they are not 
converted to our way of feeding; but though we are a small 
number of an alien race profiting by the territory and pro- 
duce of these prejudiced people, they are unable to turn us 
out; at least, when they tried we showed them their mis- 
take. We do not call ourselves a dispersed and a punished 
people: we are a colonizing people, and it is we who have 
punished others. 

Still, the historian guides us rightly in urging us to dwell 
on the virtues of our ancestors with emulation, and to 
cherish our sense of a common descent as a bond of obli- 
gation. The eminence, the nobleness of a people, depends 
on its capability of being stirred by memories, and of striv- 
ing for what we call spiritual ends — ends which consist not 
in immediate material possession, but in the satisfaction of 
a great feeling that animates the collective body as with 
one soul. A people having the seed of worthiness in it 
must feel an answering thrill when it is adjured by the 
deaths of its heroes who died to j)reserve its national exist- 
ence: when it is reminded of its small beginnings and grad- 
ual growth through past labors and struggles, such as are 
still demanded of it in order that the freedom and well-be- 
ing thus inherited may be transmitted unimpaired to chil- 
dren and children's children; when an appeal against the 
permission of injustice is made to great precedents in its 
history and to the better genius breathing in its institu- 
tions. It is this living force of sentiment in common 
which makes a national consciousness. Nations so moved 
will resist conquest with the very breasts of their women, 
will pay their millions and their blood to abolish slavery, 
will share privation in famine and all calamity, will pro- 
duce poets to sing some great story of a man,^^ and think- 
ers whose theories will bear the test of action. An indi- 
vidual man, to be harmoniously great, must belong to a 
nation of this order, if not in actual existence, yet existing 
in the past, in memory, as a departed, invisible, beloved 
ideal, once a reality, and perhaps to be restored. A com- 


134 IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

nion humanity is not yet enough to feed the rich blood of 
various activity which makes a comj)lete man. The time 
is not come for cosmopolitanism to be highly virtuous, any 
more than for communism to suffice for social energy. I 
am not bound to feel for a Chinaman as I feel for my fel- 
low-countryman; I am bound not to demoralize him with 
opium, not to compel him to my will by destroying or plun- 
dering the fruits of his labor on the alleged ground that he 
is not cosmopolitan enough, and not to insult him for his 
want of my tailoring and religion when he appears as a 
peaceable visitor on the London pavement. It is admi- 
rable in a Briton with a good purpose to learn Chinese, but 
it would not be a proof of fine intellect in him to taste Chi- 
nese poetry in the original more than he tastes the poetry 
of his own tongue. Affection, intelligence, duty, radiate 
from a center, and nature has decided that for us English 
folk that center can be neither China nor Peru. Most of 
us feel this unreflectingly; for the affectation of undervalu- 
ing everything native, and being too fine for one^s own 
country, belongs only to a few minds of no dangerous lev- 
erage. What is wanting is, that we should recognize a 
corresponding attachment to nationality as legitimate in 
every other people, and understand that its absence is a 
privation of the greatest good. 

For, to repeat, not only the nobleness of a nation depends 
on the presence of this national consciousness, but also the 
nobleness of each individual citizen. Our dignity and recti- 
tude are proiiortioned to our sense of relationship with some- 
thing great, admirable, pregnant with high possibilities, 
w^orthy of sacrifice, a continual inspiration to self-repression 
and discipline by the presentation of aims larger and more 
attractive to our generous part than the securing of personal 
ease or prosperity. And a people possessing this good 
shoidd surely feel not only a ready sympathy with the effort 
of those whi>, having lost the good, strive to regain it, but 
a profound pity for any degradation resulting from its loss; 
nay, something more than jnty when happier nationalities 
hav^e made victims of the unfortunate whose memories 
nevertheless are the very fountain to which the persecutors 
trace their most vaunted blessings. 

These notions are familiar: few will deny them in the ab- 
stract, and many are found loudly asserting them in rela- 
tion to this or the other particular case. But here as else- 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 135 

where, in the ardent application of ideas, there is a notable 
lack of simple comparison or sensibility to resemblance. 
The European world has long been used to consider the 
Jews as altogether exceptional, and it has followed natu- 
rally enough that they have been excepted from the rules of 
justice and mercy, which are based on human likeness. 
But to consider a people whose ideas have determined the 
religion of half the world, and that the more cultivated 
half, and who made the most eminent struggle against the 
power of Home, as a purely exceptional race, is a demoraliz- 
ing olfense against rational knowledge, a stultifying incon- 
sistency in historical interpretation. Every nation of forci- 
ble character — L a, of strongly-marked characteristics, is 
so far exceptional. The distinctive note of each bird-species 
is in this sense exceptional, but the necessary ground of 
such distinction is a deeper likeness. The superlative 
peculiarity in the Jews admitted, our affinity with them is 
only the more apparent when the elements of their peculi- 
arity are discerned 

From whatever point of vieAV the Avritings of the Old 
Testament may be regarded, the picture they present of 
a national development is of high interest and specialty, nor 
can their historic momentousness be much affected by any 
varieties of theory as to the relation they bear to the New 
Testament or to the rise and constitution of Christianity. 
Whether we accept the canonical Hebrew books as a revela- 
tion, or simply as part of an ancient literature, makes no 
difference to the fact that Ave find there the strongly charac- 
terized portraiture of a- people educated from an earlier or 
later period to a sense of separateness unique in its intensity, 
a people taught by many concurrent influences to identify 
faithfulness to its national traditions Avith the highest social 
and religious blessings. Our too scanty sources of JeAvisli 
history, from the return under Ezra to the beginning of the 
desperate resistance against Rome, shoAv us the heroic and 
triumphant struggle of the Maccabees, Avhich rescued the 
religion and independence of the nation from the corrupt- 
ing sAvay of the Syrian Greeks, adding to the glorious sum 
of its memorials, and stimulating continuous efforts of a 
more peaceful sort to maintain and develop that national life 
Avhich the heroes had fought and died for, by internal meas- 
ures of legal administration and public teaching. Thence- 
forth the virtuous elements of the JeAvish life AA^ere engaged, 


136 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


as they had been with varying aspects during the long and 
changeful prophetic period and the restoration under Kzra, 
on the side of preserving the specific national character 
against a demoralizing fusion with that of foreigners whose 
religion and ritual were idolatrous and often obscene. 
There was always a foreign party reviling the National 
party as narrow, and sometimes manifesting their own 
breadth in extensive views of advancement or profit to 
themselves by flattery of a foreign power. Such internal 
conflict naturally tightened the bands of conservatism, which 
needed to be strong if it were to rescue tlie sacred ark, the 
vital spirit of a small nation — the smallest of the nations 
— whose territory la}" on the highway between three con- 
tinents; and when the dread and hatred of foreign sway 
had condensed itself into dread and hatred of the Eomans, 
many Conservatives became Zealots, ivhose chief mark was 
that they advocated resistance to the death against the sub- 
mergence of their nationality. Much might be said on this 
point toward distinguishing the desperate struggle against 
a conquest which is regarded as degradation and corruption, 
from rash, hopeless insurrection against an established 
native government; and for my part (if that were of any 
consequence) I share the sjiirit of the Zealots. I take the 
spectacle of the Jewish peo2)le defying the Eoman edict, 
and preferring death by starvation or the sword, to the in- 
troduction of Caligula^s deified statue into the temple, as a 
sublime type of steadfastness. But all that need be noticed 
here is the continuity of that national education (by out- 
ward and inward circumstance) which created in the Jews 
a feeling of race, a sense of corporate existence, unique in 
its intensity. 

But not, before the dispersion, unique in essential quali- 
ties. There is more likeness than contrast between the way 
we English got our island and the way the Israelites got 
Canaan. We have not been noted for forming a low esti- 
mate of ourselves in comparison with foreigners, or for ad- 
mitting that our institutions are equaled by those of any 
other people under the sun. Many of us have thought that 
our sea-wall is a specially divine arrangement to make and 
kee}) us a nation of sea-kings, after the manner of our 
forefathers, secure against invasion, and able to invade 
other lands when we need them, though they may lie on 
the other side of the ocean. Again, it has been held that 


IMPEESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 137 

we have a peculiar destiny as a Protestant people, not only 
able to bruise the head of an idolatrous Christianity in the 
midst of ns, but fitted as possessors of the most truth and 
the most tonnage, to carry our purer religion over the world 
and convert mankind to our way of thinking. The Puri- 
tans, asserting their liberty to restrain tyrants, found the 
Hebrew history closely symbolical of their feelings and 
purpose; and it can hardly be correct to cast the blame of 
their less laudable doings on the writings they invoked, 
since their opponents made use of the same writings for 
difi'erent ends, finding there a strong warrant for the divine 
right of kings, and the denunciation of those who, like 
Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, ,took on themselves the office 
of the priesthood, which belonged of right solely to Aaron 
and his sons, or, in other words, to men ordained by the 
English bishops. We must rather refer the passionate use 
of the Hebrew writings to affinities of disposition between 
our own race and the Jewish. Is it true that the arrogance 
of a Jew was so immeasurably beyond that of a Calvinist? 
And the just sympathy and admiration which we give to 
the ancestors who resisted the oppressive acts of our native 
kings, and by resisting rescued or won for us the best part 
of our civil and religious liberties — is it justly to be with- 
held from those brave and steadfast men of Jewish race who 
fought and died, or strove by wise administration to resist, 
the oppression and corrupting influences of foreign tyrants, 
and by resisting rescued the nationality which was the very 
hearth of our own religion? At any rate, seeing that the 
Jews were more specifically than any other nation educated 
into a sense of their supreme moral value, the chief matter 
of surprise is that any other nation is found to rival them 
in this form of self-confidence. 

More exceptional — less like the course of our own history 
— has been their dispersion and their subsistence as a sepa- 
rate people through ages in which, for the most part, they 
were regarded and treated very much as beasts hunted for 
the sake of their skins, or of a valuable secretion peculiar 
to their species. The Jews showed a talent for accumulat- 
ing what was an object of more immediate desire to Chris- 
tians than animal oils or well-furred skins, and their cupid- 
ity and avarice were found at once particularly hateful and 
particularly useful; hateful when seen as a reason for punish- 
ing them by mulcting or robbery, useful when this retribu- 


138 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


tive process could be successfully carried forward. Kings 
and em2)erors naturally were more alive to the usefulness of 
subjects who could gather and yield money; but edicts is- 
sued to i^rotect the King^s Jews equally with the King^s 
game from being harassed and hunted by the commonalty 
were only slight mitigations to the dejdorable lot of a race 
held to be under the divine curse,, and had little force after 
the Crusades began. As the slave-holders in the United 
States counted the curse on Ham a justification of negro 
slavery, so the curse on the, Jews \vas counted a justification 
for hindering them from pursuing agriculture and handi- 
crafts; for marking them out as execrable figures by a pecu- 
liar dress; for torturing them to make them part with their 
gains, or for more gratuitiously spitting at them and pelt- 
ing them; for taking it as certain that they killed and eat 
babies, poisoned the wells, and took j)ains to spread the 
plague; for putting it to them whether they would be baj)- 
tized or burned, and not failing to burn and massacre them 
when they were obstinate; but also for sus^iecting them of 
disliking the baptism when they had got it, and then burn- 
ing them in j^unishment of their insincerity; finally, for 
hounding tliem by tens on tens of thousands from the 
homes where they had found shelter for centuries, and in- 
fiicting on them the horrors of a new exile and a new dis- 
persion. All this to avenge the Saviour of mankind, or 
else to com2)el these stiff-necked people to acknowledge a 
Master whose servants showed such beneficent effects of his 
teaching. 

With a j^eopleso treated, one of two issues was possible: 
either from being of feebler nature than their persecutors, 
and caring more for ease than for the sentiments and ideas 
which constituted their distinctive character, they would 
everywhere give way to pressure and get rapidly merged in 
the populations around them; or, being endowed with un- 
common ^nacity, physical and mental, feeling peculiarly 
the ties of inheritance both in blood and faith, remem- 
bering national glories, trusting in their recovery, abhor- 
ring apostasy, able to bear all things and hope all things 
with the consciousness of being steadfast to spiritual obliga- 
tions, the kernel of their number would harden into an in- 
fiexibility more and more insured by motive and habit. 
They w^ould cherish all differences that marked them off 
from their hated oppressors, all memories that consoled 


IMPEESSIOlSrS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


139 


them with a sense of virtual though unrecognized superior- 
ity; and the separateness which was made their badge of 
ignominy would be their inward pride, their source of for- 
tifying defiance. Doubtless sucH a people would get con- 
firmed in vice. An oppressive government and a per- 
secuting religion, while breeding vices in those who hold 
230 wer, are well known to breed answering vices in those 
.who are powerless and suffering. Wliat more direct plan 
than the course presented by European history could have 
been perused in order to give the Jews a spirit of bitter 
isolation, of scorn for the wolfish hypocrisy that made vic- 
tims of them, of triumph in prospering at the expense of 
the blunderers who stoned them away from the 023e]i 23aths 
of industry? — or, on the other hand, to encourage in the 
less defiant a lying conformity, a pretense of conversion for 
the sake of the social advantages attached to baptism, an 
outward renunciation of their hereditary ties with the lack 
of real love toward the society and creed which exacted this 
galling tribute? — or again, in the most unha23py specimens 
of the race, to rear transcendent examples of odious vice, 
reckless instruments of rich men with bad propensities, un- 
scrupulous grinders of the alieii people Avho wanted to grind 
them ? 

No wonder the Jews had their vices; no wonder if it were 
proved (which it has not hitherto appeared to be) that some 
of the mhad a bad pre-eminence in evil, an unrivaled su- 
perfluity of naughtiness. It would be more plausible to 
make a wonder of the virtues which have prospered among 
them under the shadow of 023pression. But instead of 
dwelling on these, or treating as admitted Avhat any hardy 
or ignorant person may deny, let us found simply on the 
loud assertions of the hostile. The Jews, it is said, resisted 
the expansion of their own religion into Christianity; they 
were in the habit of spitting on the cross; they have held 
the name of Christ to be Anathema, Who taught them 
that? The men who made Christianity a curse to them; 
the men who made the name of Christ a symbol for the 
spirit of vengeance, and, what was worse, made the execu- 
tion of the vengeance a pretext for satisfying their own sav- 
ageness, greed, and envy; the men who sanctioned with the 
name of Christ a barbaric and blundering copy of pagan 
fatalism in taking the words ^^His blood be upon us and 
on our children as a divinely appointed verbal warrant 


140 IMPKESSTOKS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

for wreaking cruelty from generation to generation on 
the i^eople from whose sacred Avritings Christ drew his 
teaching. Strange retrogression in the professors of an 
expanded religion, boasting an illumination beyond the 
s])iritual doctrine of Hebrew prophets! For Hebrew 
prophets proclaimed a God who demanded mercy rather 
than sacrifices. The Christians also believed that God de- 
lighted not in the blood of rams and of bulls, but they 
apparently conceived Him as requiring for His satisfaction 
the sighs and groans, the blood and roasted flesh of men 
whose forefathers had misunderstood the metaphorical 
character of j^i’opliecies Avhich spoke of spiritual pre-emi- 
nence under the figure of a material kingdom. Was this 
the method by which Christ desired His title to the Mes- 
siahship to be commended to the hearts and understand- 
ings of the nation in Avhich He Avas born? Many of His 
sayings bear the stamp of that patriotism Avhich places 
feilow-countrymen in the inner circle of aflection and duty. 
And did the Avords ‘'^Father, forgive tliem, they know not 
Avhat they do,^^ refer only to the centurion and his band, a 
tacit exception being made of every HebreAV there present 
from the mercy of the Father and the compassion of the 
Son? — nay, more, of every HebrcAV yet to come Avho re- 
mained unconverted after hearing of His claim to tlie 
Messiahship, not from His own lips or those of His native 
apostles, but from the lips of alien men Avhom cross, creed, 
and bajitism had left cruel, rapacious, and debauched? It 
is more reverent to Christ to believe that He must have ap- 
proved the JeAvish martyrs AA^ho deliberately chose to be 
burned or massacred rather than be guilty of a blaspheming 
lie, more than He approved the rabble of crusaders Avho 
robbed and murdered them in His name. 

But these remonstrances seem to have no direct applica- 
tion to personages Avho take up the attitude of philosophic 
thinkers and discriminating critics, professedly accepting 
Christianity from a rational 23oint of viev/ as a vehicle of 
the highest religious and moral truth, and condemning the 
JeAvs on the ground that they are obstinate adherents of an 
outworn creed, maintain themselves in moral alienation 
from the iieojiles Avith whom they share citizenship, and 
are destitute of real interest in the welfare of the com- 
munity and State Avith Avhich they are thus identified. 
These anti-Judaic advocates usually belong to a party Avhich 


IMPRESSIO^iTS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


141 


lias felt itself glorified in winning for Jews, as well as Dis- 
senters and Catholics, the full privileges of citizenship, lay- 
ing open to them every path to distinction. At one time 
the voice of this party urged that differences of creed were 
made dangerous only by the denial of citizenship — that 
you must make a man a citizen before he could feel like 
one. At present, apparently, this confidence has been suc- 
ceeded by a sense of mistake: there is a regret that no limit- 
ing clauses were insisted on, such as would have hindered 
the Jews from coming too far and in too large j)roportion 
along those opened pathways; and the Eoumanians are 
thought to have shown an enviable wisdom in giving them 
as little chance as possible. But then, the reflection occur- 
ring that some of the most objectionable Jews are baptized 
Christians, it is obvious that such clauses would have been 
insufficient, and the doctrine that you can turn a Jew into 
a good Christian is emphatically retracted. But clearly, 
these liberal gentlemen, too late enlightened by disagreeable 
events, must yield the palm of wise foresight to those who 
argued against them long ago, and it is a striking spectacle 
to witness minds so panting for advancement in some direc- 
tions that they are ready to force it on an unwilling society, 
in this instance despairingly recurring to mediaeval types of 
thinking — insisting that the Jews are made viciously cos- 
mopolitan by holding the world^s money-bag, that for them 
all national interests are resolved into the algebra of loans, 
that they have suffered an inward degradation stamping 
them as morally inferior, and — ''serve them right, since 
they rejected Christianity. All which is mirrored in an 
analogy, namely, that of the Irish, also a servile race, who 
have rejected Protestantism, though it has been repeatedly 
urged on them by fire and sword and penal laws, and whose 
place in the moral scale may be judged by our advertise- 
ments, where the clause, "No Irish need apply, parallels 
the sentence which for many polite persons sums ujd the 
question of Judaism — " I never did like the Jews.'’^ 

It is certainly worth considering whether an expatriated, 
denationalized race, used for ages to live among antipa- 
thetic populations, must not inevitably lack some condi- 
tions of nobleness. If they drop that separateness which 
is made their reproach, they may be in danger of lapsing 
into a cosmopolitan indifference equivalent to cynicism, and 
of missing that inward identification with the nationality 


U2 


IMPEESSIONS OF THEOPHKASTUS SUCH. 


immediately around them which might make some amends 
for their inherited privation. No dispassionate observer 
can deny this danger. AVhy, our own countrymen who 
take to living abroad, without purpose or function to keep 
up their sense of fellowship in the affairs of their own land, 
are rarely good specimens of moral healthiness; still, the 
consciousness of having a native country, the birth-place of 
common memories and habits of mind, existing like a pa- 
rental hearth quitted but beloved; the dignity of being in- 
cluded in a people which has a part in the comity of na- 
tions and the growing federation of the world; that sense 
of special belonging which is the root of human virtues, 
both public and private — all these spiritual links may pre- 
serve migratory Englishmen from the worst consequences 
of their voluntary dispersion. Unquestionably the Jews, 
having been more than any other race exposed to the ad- 
verse moral influences of alienism, must, both in individuals 
and in groups, have suffered some corresponding moral 
degradation; but in fact they have escaped with less of ab- 
jectness and less of hard hostility toward the nations whose 
hand has been against them, than could have happened in 
in the case of a people who had neither their adhesion to 
a separate religion founded on historic memories, nor their 
characteristic family affectionateness. Tortured, flogged, 
spit upon, the corpus idle on which rage or wantonness 
vented themselves with impunity, their name flung at them 
as an opprobrium by superstition, hatred, and contempt, 
they have remained proud of their origin. Does any one 
call this an evil pride? Perhaps he belongs to that order 
of man who, while he has a democratic dislike to dukes and 
earls, wants to make believe that his father was an idle 
gentleman, when in fact he was an honorable artisan, or 
who would feel flattered to be taken for other than an En- 
glishman. It is possible to be too arrogant about our blood 
or our calling, but that arrogance is virtue compared Avith 
such mean-q}retense. The pride which identifies us with a 
great historic body is a humanizing, elevating habit of 
mind, inspiring sacrifices of individual comfort, gain, or 
other selfish ambition, for the sake of that ideal whole; and 
no man swayed by such a sentiment can become comifletely 
abject. 

That a Jew of Smyrna, where a whip is carried by pas- 
sengers, ready to flog off the too officious specimens of his 


IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


143 


race, can still be proud to say, I am a Jew,^^ is surely a 
fact to awaken admiration in a mind capable of under- 
standing what we may call the ideal forces in human his- 
tory. And again, a varied, impartial observation of the 
Jews in different countries tends to the impression that 
they have a predominant kindliness which must have been 
deeply ingrained in the constitution of their race to have 
outlasted the ages of persecution and oj^pression. The con- 
centration of their joys in domestic life has kept up in 
them the capacity of tenderness; the pity for the fatherless 
and the widow, the care for the women and the little ones, 
blent intimately with their religion, is a well of mercy that 
can not long or widely be pent up by exclusiveness. And 
the kindliness of the Jew overflows the line of division be- 
tween him and the Gentile. On the whole, one of the 
most remarkable phenomena in the history of this scattered 
people, made for ages a scorn and a hissing, is, that 
after being subjected to this process, which might have 
been expected to be in every sense deteriorating and vitiat- 
ing, they have come out of it (in any estimate wliich al- 
lows for numerical proportion) rivaling the nations of all 
European countries in healthiness and beauty of physique, 
in practical ability, in scientific and artistic aptitude, and 
in some forms of ethical value. A significant indication of 
their natural rank is seen in the fact that at this moment 
the leader of the Liberal party in Germany is a Jew, the 
leader of the Eepublican party in France is a Jew, and the 
head of the Conservative ministry in England is a Jew. 

And here it is that we find the ground for the obvious 
jealousy which is now stimulating the revived expression of 
old antipathies. The Jews,^^ it is felt, have a danger- 
ous tendency to get the uppermost places, not only in com- 
merce, but in political life. Their monetary hold on gov- 
ernments is tending to perpetuate in leading Jews a spirit 
• of universal alienism (euphemistically called cosmopolitan- 
ism), even \Yhere the West has given them a full share in 
civil and political rights. A people with Oriental sunlight 
in their blood, yet capable of being everywhere acclima- 
tized, they have a force and toughness which enables them 
to carry off the best prizes; and their wealth is likely to put 
half the seats in Parliament at their disposal. 

There is truth in these views of Jewish social and polit- 
ical relations. But it is rather too late for liberal pleaders to 


144 IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

urge them in a merely vituperative sense. Do they jiro- 
pose, as a remedy for the impending danger of our healthier 
national influence getting overridden by Jewish predomi- 
nance, that we should repeal our emancipatory laws? Not 
all the Germanic immigrants who have been settling among 
us for generations, and are still pouring in to settle, are 
Jews, but thoroughly Teutonic and more or less Christian 
craftsmen, mechanicians, or skilled and erudite functiona- 
ries; and the Semitic Christians who swarm among us are 
dangerously like their unconverted brethren in complexion, 
persistence^ and wealth. Then there are the Greeks who, 
by the help of Phoenician blood or otherwise, are objection- 
ably strong in the city. Some judges think that the Scotch 
are more numerous and prosperous here in the South than 
is quite for the good of us Southerners; and the early in- 
convenience felt under the Stuarts of being quartered upon 
by a hungry, hard-working people with a distinctive accent 
and form of religion, and higher cheekbones than English 
taste requires, has not yet been quite neutralized. As for 
the Irish, it is felt in high quarters that we have always 
been too lenient toward them; at least, if they had been 
harried a little more there might not have been so many of 
them on the English press, of which they divide the power 
with the Scotch, thus driving many Englishmen to honest 
and ineloquent labor. 

So far shall we be carried if we go in search of devices 
to hinder people of other blood than our own from getting 
the advantage of dwelling among us. 

Let it be admitted that it is a calamity to the English, 
as to any other great historic people, to undergo a prema- 
ture fusion with immigrants of alien blood; that its dis- 
tinctive national characteristics should be in danger of 
obliteration by the predominating quality of foreign set- 
tlers. I not only admit this, I am ready to unite in groaning 
over the threatened danger. To one who loves his native 
language, wlKtwould delight to keep our rich and harmoni- 
ous English undefiled by foreign accent, foreign intonation, 
and those foreign tinctures of verbal meaning which tend 
to confuse all writing and discourse, it is an affliction as 
harassing as the climate, that on our stage, in our studios, 
at our public and private gatherings, in our offices, ware- 
houses, and work- shops, we must expect to hear our beloved 
English with its words clqiped, its vowels stretched and 


IMPRESSIOKS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 145 

twisted, its jdirases of rtcquiescence and politeness, of cor- 
diality, dissidence or argument, delivered always in the 
wrong tones, like ill-rendered melodies, marred beyond 
recognition; that there should be a general ambition to 
speak every language except our mother English, which 
persons of style are not ashamed of corrupting with 
slang, false foreign equivalents, and a pronunciation that 
crushes out all color from the vowels and jams them be- 
tween jostling consonants. An ancient Greek might not 
like to be resuscitated for the sake of hearing Homer read 
in our universities, still he would at least find more in- 
structive marvels in other developments to be witnessed at 
those institutions; but a modern Englishman is invited 
from his after-dinner repose to hear Shakespeare delivered 
under circumstances which offer no other novelty than 
some novelty of false intonation, some new distribution of 
strong emphasis, on prepositions, some new misconception 
of a familiar idiom. Well! it is our inertness that is in 
fault, our carelessness of excellence, our willing ignorance 
of the treasures that lie in our national heritage, wliile 
we are agape after what is foreign, though it may be only 
a vile imitation of what is native. 

This marring of our speech, however, is a minor evil 
compared with what must follow from the predominance of 
wealth-acquiring immigrants; whose ai^preciation of our po- 
litical and social life must as often be as approximative or 
fatally erroneous as their delivery of our language. But 
take the worst issues — what can we do to hinder them? Are 
we to adopt the exclusiveness for which we have punished 
the Chinese? Are we to tear the glorious flag of hospitality 
which has made our freedom the world- wide blessing of the 
oppressed? It is not agreeable to find foreign accents and 
stumbling locutions passing from the j)iqnant exception to 
the general rule of discourse. But to urge on that account 
that we should spike away the peaceful foreigner, would be 
a view of international relations not in the long-run favor- 
able to the interests of our fellow-countrymen; for we are 
at least equal to the races we call obtrusive in the disposi- 
tion to settle wherever money is to be made and cheaply 
idle living to be found. In meeting the national evils which 
are brought upon us by the onward course of the world, 
there is often no more immediate hope or resource than that 
of striving after fuller national excellence, which must con- 


I4(> IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 

eist in the molding of more excellent individual natives. 
The tendency of things is toward the quicker or slower 
fusion of races. It is impossible to arrest this tendency, 
nil we can do is to moderate its course so as to hinder it 
from degrading the moral status of societies by a too rapid 
effacement of those national traditions and customs which 
are the language of the national genius— the deep suckers of 
healthy sentiment. Such moderating and guidance of in- 
evitable movement is worthy of all effort. And it is in this 
sense that the -modern insistence on the idea of Nationalities 
has value. That any people at once distinct and coherent 
enough to form a State should be held in subjection by an 
alien antipathetic government has been becoming more and 
more a ground of sympathetic indignation; and in virtue of 
this, at least one great State has been added to European 
councils. Nobody now complains of the result in this case, 
though far-sighted persons see the need to limit analogy by 
discrimination. We have to consider who are the stifled 
people and who are the stiflers before we can be ’sure of our 
ground. The only point in this connection on which 
Englishmen are agreed is, that England itself shall not be 
subject to foreign rule. The fiery resolve to resist invasion, 
though with an improvised array of pitchforks, is felt to be 
virtuous, and to be worthy of a historic people. Why? Be- 
cause there is a national life in our veins. Because there is 
something specifically English which we feel to be supremely 
worth striving for, worth dying for, rather than living to 
renounce it. Because we too have our share — perhaps a 
principal share — in that spirit of separateness which has not 
yet done its work in the education of mankind, which has 
created the varying genius of nations, and, like the Muses, 
is the offspring of memory. 

Here, as everywhere else, the human task seems to be 
the discerning and adjustment of opposite claims. But 
the end _Qan hardly be achieved by urging contradictory 
reproaches, and instead of laboring after discernment as a 
preliminary to intervention, letting our zeal burst forth 
according to a capricious selection, first determined acci- 
dentally and afterward justified by personal predilection. 
Not only John Gilpin and his wife, or Edwin and Angelina, 
seem to be of opinion that their preference or dislike of 
Russians, Servians, or Greeks, consequent, perhaps, on 
hotel adventures, has something to do with the merits of 


IMPRESSIOlSrS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


147 


the Eastern Question; even in a higher range of intellect 
and enthusiasm we find a distribution of sympathy or pity 
for sufferers of different blood or votaries of different relig- 
ions, strangely unaccountable on any other ground than a 
fortuitous direction of study or trivial circumstances of 
travel. With some even admirable persons, one is never 
quite sure of any particular being included under a general 
term. A provincial physician, it is said, once ordering a 
lady patient not to eat salad, was asked pleadingly by the 
affectionate husband whether she might eat lettuce, or 
cresses, or radishes. The physician had too rashly believed 
in the comprehensiveness of the word salad,^^ just as we, 
if not enlightened by experience, might believe in the all- 
embracing breadth of sympath}^ with the injured and 
oppressed. What mind can exhaust the grounds of ex- 
ception which lie in each particular case? There is under- 
stood to be a peculiar odor from the negro body, and we 
know that some persons, too rationalistic to feel bound by 
the curse on Ham, used to hint very strongly that this odor 
determined tlie question on the side of negro-slavery. 

And this is the usual level of thinking in polite society 
concerning the Jews. Apart from theological purposes, it 
seems to be held surprising that anybody should take an 
interest in the history of a people whose literature has fur- 
nished all our devotional language; and if any reference is 
made to their past or future destinies, some hearer is sure 
to state as a relevant fact which may assist our judgment, 
that she, for her part, is not fond of them, having known 
a Mr. Jacobson who was very unpleasant; or that he, for 
his part, thinks meanly of them as a race, though on in- 
quiry you find that he is so little acquainted with their 
characteristics that he is astonished to learn how many j^er- 
sons whom he has blindly admired and applauded are 
Jews to the backbone. Again, men who consider them- 
selves in the very van of modern advancement, knowing 
history and the latest philosophies of history, indicate their 
contemptuous surprise that any one should entertain the 
destiny of the Jews as a worthy subject, by referring to 
Moloch and their own agreement with the theory that the 
religion of Jehovah was merely a transformed Moloch-wor- 
ship, while in the same breath they are glorifying civili- 
zation as a transformed tribal existence of which some 
lineaments are traceable in grim marriage customs of tlio 


148 


IMPRESSIOXS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


native Australians. Are these erudite persons prepared to 
insist that the name Father should no longer have any 
sanctity for us, because in their view of likelihood our AiA aii 
ancestors were mere improvers on a state of things in which 
nobody knew his own father? 

For less theoretic men, ambitious to be regarded as prac- 
tical politicians, the value of the Hebrew race has been 
measured by their unfavorable opinion of a i^rime minister 
who is a Jew by lineage. But it is possible to form a very 
ugly opinion as to the scrupulousness of Walpole or of 
Chatham; and in any case I think Englishmen would re- 
fuse to accept the character and doings of those eighteen th- 
century statesmen as the standard of value for the English 
people and the part they have to play in the fortunes of 
mankind. 

If we are to consider the future of the Jews at all, it 
seems reasonable to take as a preliminary question: Are 
they destined to comj)lete fusion with the peojDles among 
whom they are dispersed, losing every remnanf of a dis- 
tinctive consciousness as Jews; or, are there in the breadth 
and intensity with which the feeling of separateness, or 
what we may call the organized memory of a national con- 
sciousness, actually exists in the world-wide Jewish com- 
munities — the seven millions scattered from east to west — 
and again, are there in the political relations of the world, 
the conditions present or approaching for the restoration of 
a Jewish State planted on the old ground as a center of 
national feeling, a source of dignifying protection, a special 
channel for special energies which may contribute some 
added form of natural genius, and an added voice in the 
councils of the world? 

They are among us eveiywhere: it is useless to say we 
are not fond of them. Perhaps we are not fond of pro- 
letaries and their tendency to form Unions, but the world 
is not therefore to be rid of them. If we wish to free our- 
selves from the inconveniences that we have to complain of, 
■whether in proletaries or in Jews, our best course is to en- 
courage all means of improving these neighbors who elbow 
us in a thickening crowd, and of sending their incom- 
modious energies into beneficent channels. Why are we 
so eager for the dignity of certain jiopulations of whom 
perhaps we have never seen a single specimen, and of whose 
history, legend, or literature we have been contentedly 


IMPEESSIOls^S OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


149 


ignorant for ages, while we sneer at the notion of a reno- 
vated national dignity for the Jews, whose ways of thinking 
and whose very verbal forms are on our lips in every prayer 
which we end with an Amen? Some of us consider this 
question dismissed when they have said that the wealthiest 
Jews have no desire to forsake their European palaces and 
go to live in Jerusalem. But in a return from exile, in the 
restoration of a people, the question is not whether certain 
rich men will choose to remain behind, but whether there 
will be found worthy men who choose to lead the return. 
Plenty of prosperous Jews remained in Babylon when Ezra 
marshaled his band of forty thousand and began a new 
glorious epoch in the history of his race, making the prej)- 
aration for that epoch in the history of the world which has 
been held glorious enough to be dated from for evermore. 
The hinge of possibility is simply the existence of an ade- 
quate community of feeling as well as wide-spread need in 
the Jewish race, and the hope that among its finer speci- 
mens there may arise sorjie men of instruction and ardent 
2)ublic spirit, some new Ezras, some modern Maccabees, 
who will know how to use all favoring outward conditions, 
how to triumph by heroic example, over the indifference of 
their fellows and the scorn of their foes, and will stead- 
fastly set their faces toward making their people once more 
one among the nations. 

Formerly, evangelical orthodoxy was prone to dwell on 
the fulfillment of prophecy in the ^^restoration of the 
Jews. Such interpretation of the prophets is less in 
vogue now. The dominant mode is to insist on a Chris- 
tianity that disowns its origin, that is not a substantial 
growth having a genealogy, but is a vaporous reflex of 
modern notions. The Christ of Matthew had the heart of a 
Jew : Go ye first to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. 

The Apostle of the Gentiles had the heart of a Jew: For 

I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my 
brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh: who are 
Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, 
and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the 
service of God, and the promises; whose are the fathers, 
and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came."^^ Mod- 
ern apostles, extolling Christianity, are found using a differ- 
ent tone: they prefer the mediaeval cry translated into 
modern phrase. But the mediaeval cry too was in sub- 


150 


IMPEESSIOKS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 


stance very ancient — more ancient than the days of Au- 
gustus. Pagans in successive ages said, These people 
are unlike us, and refuse to be made like us: let us punish 
them. The Jews were steadfast in their separateness, and 
through that separateness Christianity was born. A mod- 
ern book on Liberty has maintained that from the freedom 
of individual men to persist in idiosyncrasies the world may 
be enriched. Why should we not apply this argument to 
the idiosyncrasy of a nation, and pause in our haste to hoot 
it down? There is still a great function for the steadfast- 
ness of the Jew . not that he should shut out the utmost 
illumination which knowledge can throw on his national 
history, but that he should cherish the store of inheritance 
which that history has left him. Every Jew should Be con- 
scious that he is one of a multitude possessing common ob- 
jects of piety in the immortal achievements and immortal 
sorrows of ancestors who have transmitted to them a phys- 
ical and mental type strong enough, eminent enough in 
faculties, pregnant enough with peculiar promise, to consti‘^ 
tute a new beneficent individuality among the nations, and 
by confuting the traditions of scorn, nobly avenge the 
wrongs done to their Fathers. 

There is a sense in which the worthy child of a nation 
that has brought forth illustrious prophets, high and 
unique among the poets of the wnrld, is bound hj theii 
visions. 

Is bound? 

Yes, for the effective bond of human action is feeling, 
and the worthy child of a people owning the triple name of 
Hebrew, Israelite, and Jew, feels his kinship with the glo- 
ries and the sorrows, the degradation and the possible reno- 
vation of his national family. 

Will any one teach the nullification of this feeling and 
call his doctrine a philosophy? He will teach a blinding 
superstition’— the superstition that a theory of human well- 
being can be constructed in disregard of the influences which 
have made us human. 


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202 Abbot, The. Sequel to “ The 
Monastery.” By Sir Walter 


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36 Adam Bede. By George Eliot. 20 
388 Addie’s Husband ; or. Through 
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author of ” Love or Lands?”. 10 
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462 Alice’s Adventures in Wonder- 
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484 .Although He Was a Lord, and 

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tie Jephson lO 

403 An English Squire. By C. R. 

Coleridge 20 

648 Angel of the Bells, The. By F. 

Du Boisgobey 20 

263 An Ishmaelite. By Miss M. E. 

Braddon 20 

154 Annan Water. By Robert Buch- 
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200 An Old Man’s Love. By Anthony 

Trollope 10 

93 Anthony Trollope's Autobiog- 

raphj^ 20 

395 Archipelago on Fire, The. By 

Jules Verne 10 

532 Arden Court. Barbara Graham 20 
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Charlotte M. Yonge 10 

224 Ai uudel Motto, The. By Mary 

Cecil Hay 20 

347 As Avon Flows. By Henry Scott 

Vince 20 

541 “ As it Fell Upon a Day.” By 
“The Duchess,” and Uncle 

Jack. By Walter Besant 10 

560 Asphodel. By Miss Braddon.. 20 
540 At a High Price. By E. Werner 20 
352 At Any Cost. By Edw. Garrett 10 
564 At Bay. By Mrs. Alexander. . . 10 
528 At His Gates. By 31 rs. Oliphant 20 
192 At the World’s Mercy. By F. 

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Second half 

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L. B. Walford 

342 Baby, The, and One New Year’s 

Eve. B}’’ “ The Duchess ” 

611 Babylon. By Cecil Power 

443 Bachelor of the Albany, Tlie. . . 
683 Bachelor Vicar of Newforth, 
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65 Back to the Old Home. By 

Mary Cecil Hay 

551 Barbara Heathcote's Trial. By 

Rosa Nouchette Carey 

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B. Edwards " 

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717 Beau Tancrede; or, the Mar- 
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719 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. 

By Lord Byron 10 

676 Child’s History of England, A. 

By Charles Dickens 20 

657 Christmas Angel. By B. L. Far- 

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507 Chronicles of the Canongate, 

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more 20 

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499 Cloven Foot, The. By Miss M. 

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493 Colonel Enderby’s Wife. By 

Lucas Malet 20 

221 Cornin’ Thro’ tlie Rye. By Helen 

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523 Consequences of a Duel, The. 

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547 Coquette’s Conquest, A. By 

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376 Crime of Christmas Day, The. 

By the author of ” My Ducats 

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706 Crimson Stain, A. By Annie 

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504 Curly: An Actor’s Story. By 
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544 Cut by the County; or, Grace 
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34 Daniel Deronda. By George 

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34 Daniel Deronda. By George 
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(S) 


301 Dark Days. By Hugh Conway 10 


609 Dark House, The: A Knot Un- 
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iam Black 20 

251 Daughter of the Stars, The, and 
Other Tales. By Hugh Con- 
wav. author of “Called 

Back ” 10 

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Dickens. Vol. 1 20 

22 David Copperfield. By Charles 

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527 Days of My Life. The. By Mrs. 

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305 Dead Heart, A, and Lady Gwen- 
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Thorne ” 10 

374 Dead Man’s Secret, The. By Dr. 

Jupiter Paeon ’ 20 

567 Dead Men’s Shoes. By Miss M. 

E. Braddon 20 

286 Deldee; or, The Iron Hand. By 

F. Warden 20 

115 Diamond Cut Diamond. By T. 

Adolphus Trollope 10 

744 Diana Carew ; or. For a Wom- 
an's Sake. By Mrs. Forrester 20 
350 Diana of the Crossways. By 

George Meredith 10 

478 Diavola; or. Nobody’s Daugh- 
ter. By Miss M. E. Braddon. 

Part 1 20 

478 Diavola: or, Nobody’s Daugh- 
ter. By Miss M. E. Braddon. 

Part II 20 

87 Dick Sand; or, A Captain at 

Fifteen. By Jules Verne 20 

486 Dick’s Sweetheart. By ” The 

Duchess ” 20 

536 Dissolving Views. By Mrs. An- 
drew Lang 10 

185 Dita. By Lady Margaret Ma- 

jendie 10 

594 Doctor Jacob. By Miss Betham- 

Ed wards 20 

529 Doctor's Wife, The. B3" Miss M. 

E. Braddon 20 

721 Dolores. By Mrs. Forrester. . . 20 
107 Dombe,y and Son. By Charles 

Dickens. First half 20 

107 Dombe^^ and Son. By Charles 

Dickens. Second half 20 

282 Donal Grant. By George Mac- 
Donald 20 

671 Don Gesualdo. By“Ouida.”.. 10 
51 Dora Thorne. By Charlotte M. 

Braeme 20 

284 Doris. By ” The Duchess ” — 10 
230 Dorothy Forster. By Walter 

Besant 20 

678 Dorothy’s Venture. By Mary 

Cecil Hay 20 

665 Dove in the Eagle’s Nest, The. 

By Charlotte M. Yonge 20 

585 Drawn Game, A. By Basil 20 

151 DinMe Diamonds, The. By C. 

Blather wick 10' 


THE SEASIDE LIBRARY. — Pocket Edition. 


649 Dudley Carleon ; or, Tlie Broth- 
er’s Secret, and George Caul- 
field’s Journey. By Miss M. 
E. Braddon 


465 Earl’s Atonement, The. By 
Charlotte M. Braeme, author 

of “ Dora Thorne ” 

8 East Lynne. By Mrs. Henry 

Wood 

685 England under Gladstone. 1880 
—1885. By Justin H. McCar- 
thy, M.P 

521 Entangled. By E. Fairfax 
Byrrne 

625 Erema; or. My Father’s Sin. 

By B. D. Blackmore 

96 Erling the Bold. By R. M. Bal- 

lantyne 

90 Ernest Maltra vers. By Sir E. Bul- 

wer Lytton 

162 Eugene Aram. By Sir E. Bulwer 

Lytton 

470 Evelyn’s Folly. By Charlotte 
M. Braeme, author of “Dora 

Thorne ” 

62 Executor, The. By Mrs. Alex- 
ander " 

13 Eyre’s Acquittal. B}^ Helen B. 
Mathers 

319 Face to Face : A Fact in Seven 
Fables. By R. E. Francillon. 
538 Fair Country Maid, A. By E. 

Fairfax Byrrne 

261 Fair Maid, A. By F. W. Robin- 
son 

417 Fair Maid of Perth, The; or, 
St. Valentine’s Day. By Sir 
Walter Scott, Bart 

626 Fair Mystery, A. By Charlotte 

M. Braeme, author of “ Dora 

Thorne ” ^ 

727 Fair Women. By Mrs. Forrester 
30 Faith and Unfaith. By “The 

Duchess ”. 

543 Family Affair, A. By Hugh 
Conway, author of “ Called 

Back ” 

338 Family Difficulty, The. By Sa- 
rah Doudney 

690 Far From the Madding Crowd. 

By Thomas Hardy 

680 Fast and Loose. By Arthur 

Griffiths 

246 Fatal Dower, A. By the Author 
of “His Wedded Wife” .... 
299 Fatal Lilies, The, and A Bride 
from the Sea. By Charlotte 
M. Braeme, author of “ Dora 

Thorne ” 

548 Fatal Marriage, A, and The 
Shadow in the Corner. By 

Miss M. E. Braddon 

693 Felix Holt, the Radical. By 

George Eliot 

542 Fenton’s Quest. By Miss M. E. 
Braddon 


File No. 113. By Emile Gabo- 


riau 20 

Finger of Fate, The. By Cap- 
tain Mayne Reid .. 20 

Fire Brigade, The. By R. M. 

Ballantyne 10 

First Person Singular. By Da- 
vid Christie Murray 20 

Fisher Village, The. By Anne 

Beale 10 

Flower of Doom, The, and 
Other Stories. By M. Betham- 

Edwards 10 

For Another’s Sin ; or, A Strug- 
gle for Love. By Charlotte M. 
Ih-aeme, author of “ Dora 

Thorne ” 20 

“ Fora Dream’s Sake.” By Mrs. 

Herbert Martin 20 

Foreigners, The. By Eleanor C. 

Price 20 

For Her Dear Sake. By Mary 

Cecil Hay 20 

For Himself Alone. By T. W. 

Speight 10 

For Life and Love. By Alison. 10 
For Lilias. By Rosa Nouchette 

Carey 20 

For Maimie’s Sake. By Grant 

Allen 20 

“ For Percival.” By Margaret 

Veley 20 

Fortune’s Wheel. By “ The 

Duchess” 10 

Fortunes, Good and Bad, of a 
Sewing-Girl, The. By Char- 
lotte M. Stanley 10 

Foul Play. By Charles Reade . 20 

Found Out. By Helen B. 

Mathers 10 

Frank Fairlegh : or. Scenes 
From the Life of a Private 
Pupil. By Frank E. Smedley 20 

Friendship. By “Ouida” 20 

From Gloom to Sunlight. By 
Charlotte M. Braeme, author 

of “ Dora Thorne ” 10 

From Olympus to Hades. By 

Mrs. Forrester 20 

From Post to Finish. A Racing 
Romance. By Hawley Smart 20 

Gambler’s Wife, The 20 

George Christy; or. The Fort- 
unes of a Minstrel. By Tony 
P3»stor 20 

Gerald. By Eleanor C. Price. . 20 
Ghost of Charlotte Cray, The, 
and Other Stories. By Flor- 
ence Marryat 10 

Ghost’s Touch, The, and Percy 
and the Prophet. By Wilkie 

Collins 10 

Giant’s Robe, The. By F. Anstey 20 
Gilded Sin, A, and A Bridge 
of Love. By Charlotte M. 
Braeme, author of “ Dora 
Thorne” 10 


7 

575 

10 

95 

674 

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20 745 

20 

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10 173 

20 197 

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278 

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20 288 

20 

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20 348 

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365 

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10 331 

208 

10 613 

10 225 

300 

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(4) 


THE SEASIDE I A BE A BY. -Pocket Edition. 


644 Girtoii Girl, A. By Mrs. Annie 

Edwards 

140 Glorious Fortune, A. By Wal- 
ter Besant 

647 Goblin Gold. By May Crom- 

luelin 

450 Godfrey Helstoue. By Georgi- 

ana M. Craik 

153 Golden Calf, The. By Miss M. 

E. Braddon 

306 Golden Dawn, A, and Love for a 
Day. By Charlotte M. Braeme, 
author of “ Dora Thorne ”... 
6.56 Golden Flood, The. By R. E. 

Francillon and Wm. Senior. . 
172 “ Golden Girls.” By Alan Muir 
292 Golden Heart, A. B}- Charlotte 
M. Braeme, author of “Dora 

Thorne ”. 

667 Golden Lion of Granpere, The. 

By Anthony Trollope 

356 Good Hater, A. By Frederick 

Boyle 

710 Gi'eatest Heiress in England, 

The. By Mrs. Oliphant 

439 Great Expectations. By Charles 

Dickens 

135 Great Heiress, A : A Fortune in 
Seven Checks. By R. E. Frau- 

cillon 

244 Great Mistake, A. Bv the author 

of “His Wedded Wife” 

170 Great Treason, A. By Maiy 

Hoppus 

138 Green Pastures and Piccadilly. 

By Wm. Black 

231 Griffith Gaunt; or. Jealousy. 

By Charles Reade 

677 Griselda. By the author of “A 
Woman’s Love-Story” 


597 Haco the Dreamer. By William 

Si me 

668 Half-Way. An Anglo-French 

Romance 

663 Handy Andy. By Samuel Lover 
84 Hard Times. By Chas. Dickens 
622 Harry Heathcote of Gangoil. By 

Anthony Trollope 

191 Harry Lorrequer. By Charles 

Lever 

569 Harry Muir. By Mrs. Oliphant 
169 Haunted Man, The. By Charles 

Dickens ’. . . 

533 Hazel Kirke. By Marie Walsh 
385 Headsman, The; or. The Ab- 
haye des Vignerons. By J. 

Fenimore Cooper 

572 H I'M ley. By Jessie Fotheigill. 
167 Heart and Science. By Wilkie 

Collins 

444 Heart of Jane Warner, The. By 

Florence Marryat 

391 H(?art of Mid-Lothian, The. By 

Sir Walter Scott 

695 Hearts: Queen, Knave, and 
Deuce. By David Christie 
Murray 


Heiress of Hilldrop, The; or, 


The Romance of a Young 
Girl. By Oliarlotte M. Braeme, 
author of “ Dora Thorne ”... 20 
Heir Presumptive, Tiie. By 

Florence IMarryat 20 

Helen Whitney’s Wedding, and 
Other Tales. By Mrs. Henry 

Wood 10 

Henrietta's Wish; or, Domi- 
neering. By Charlotte M. 

Yonge 10 

Her Gentle Deeds. By Sarah 

Tytler ’ lO 

Her Martyrdom. By Charlotte 
M. Braeme, author of “ Dora 

Thorne ” 20 

Her Mother’s Sin. By Charlotte 
M. Braeme, author of ” Dora 

Thorne” 10 

Hidden Perils Maiy Cecil Hay 10 

Hidden Sin, The. A*^Novel 20 

Hilary's Folly. By Charlotte 
M. Braeme, author of “Dora 

Thorne” 10 

Hilda. By Charlotte M. Braeme, 
author of “ Dora Thorne ”... 10 
History of a Week, The. By 

Mrs. L. B. Walford 10 

History of Plemy Esmond, The. 

By VVilliam M. Thackeray .. . 20 
His Wedded Wife. By author 
of “ Ladybird’s Penitence ” • . 20 
Homeward Bound; or. The 

Chase. By J. F. Cooper 20 

Home as Found. (Sequel to 
“ Homeward Bound.”) By J. 

Fenimore Cooper !... 20 

Hostages to Fortune. By Miss 

M. E. Braddon 20 

Houp-La. By John Strange 

Winter. (Illustrated) 10 

Hurrish : A Study. By the 

Hon. Emily Lawless 20 

House Divided Against Itself, 

A. By Mrs. Oliphant 20 

House on the Marsh, The. By 

F. Warden 10 

House on the Dloor, The. By 

Mrs. Oliphant 20 

House That Jack Built, The. 

By Alison 10 

Husband’s Story, A ' 10 


Ichabod. A Portrait. By Bertha 

Thomas 10 

Idonea. By Anne Beale 20 

I Have Lived and Loved. By 

Mrs. Forrester 20 

Ingledew House, and More Bit- 
ter than Death.- By Charlotte 
DI. Braeme, author of “ Dora 

Thorne ” 10 

In Cupid’s Net. By Charlotte 
M. Braeme, author of “ Dora 

Thorne ” 10 

In Durance Vile. By “ The 
Duchess ” 10 


741 

20 

10 

689 

10 

513 

20 

20 535 

10 160 

10 576 

20 

19 

10 

20 196 

518 

20 297 

20 

294 

20 

658 

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20 461 

30 378 

20 379 

20 

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20 

20 248 

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351 

10 

481 

20 

20 198 

10 

20 389 

188 

20 715 

20 

303 

20 

20 

304 

20 

404 

20 I 

(5) 


THE SEASIDE LIBBARY.— Pocket Edition. 


3“^4 In I/,ick at Last. By Walter 

Besant 

67’.' InMaremma. By Oiiida.*’ 1st 

half 

672 In Maremnia, By “ Ouicla."” 2d 

half 

604 Innocent: A Tale of Modern 
Life. By Mrs. Oliphant. First 

Half 

604 Innocent: A Tale of Modern 
Life, By Mrs. Oliphant. Sec- 
ond Half 

577 In Peril and Privation. By 

James Payn 

638 In Quarters with the 25tli (The 
Black Horse) Dragoons. By 

J. S. Winter, 

759 In Shallow Waters. By Annie 

Armitt 

39 In Silk Attire. ]5y William Black 
738 In the Golden Days. By Edna 

Lvall 

682 In the Middle Watch. By W. 

Clark Russell 

452 In the West Countrie. By ]\Iay 

Crommelin 

383 Introduced to Society. By Ham- 
ilton Aidd 

122 lone Stewart. By Mrs. E. Lynn 

Linton 

233 “ I Say No;” or, The. Love-Let- 
ter Answered. By Wilkie Col- 
lins .\ 

235 “ It is Never Too Late to Mend.” 

By Charles Reade 

28 Ivanhoe. By Sir Walter Scott. 


534 Jack. By Alphonse Daudet 

416 Jack Tier ; or, The Florida Reef. 

By J. Fenimore Cooper, 

743 Jack’s Courtship. By W. Clark 

Russell. 1st half 

743 Jack’s Courtship. By W. Clark 

Russell. 2d half 

519 James Gordon’s Wife, A Novel 
15 Jane Eyre. By Charlotte Bronte 
728 Janet’s Repentance. By George 

Eliot 

142 Jenifer. By Annie Thomas 

357 John. By Mrs. Oliphant. 

203 John Bull and His Island. By 

Max O’Rell 

289 John Bull's Neighbor in Her 
True Light. By a “Brutal 

Saxon ” 

11 John Halifax. Gentleman. By 

Miss Mu lock 

209 John Holdsworth, Chief Mate. 

By W. Clark Russell 

694 John Maidment, By Julian 

Sturgis 

570 John Marchmont's Legacy. By 

Miss M. E. Braddon 

488 Joshua Haggard s Daughter. 

By Miss M. E. Braddon 

619 Joy; or. The Light of Cold- 
Home Ford. By May Crom- 
melin 


Judith Shakespeare : Her Love 
Affairs and Other Advent- 
ures. By William Black 20 

Judith Wynne 20 

June. By Mrs. Forrester 20 

Just As I Am. By Miss M. E. 
Braddon 20 

Kilmeny. By William Black. . 20 
Klytia: A Story of Heidelberg 
Castle. By George Ta 3 ior. . . *20 

Lady Branksmere. By “The 

Duchess” 20 

Lady Audley’s Secret. Bj" Miss 

M. E. Braddon 20 

Lady’ Clare; or. The Master of 
the Forges. From the French . 

of Georges Ohnet 10 

Lady Darner's Secret. By Char- 
lotte M. Braeme, author of 

“Dora Thorne” ’20 

Lady Gay's Pride; or. The Mi- 
ser's Treasure. B.y Mrs. Alex. 

McVeigh Miller -20 

Lady Lovelace. By the author 

of “Judith Wynne” 20 

Lady Muriel’s Secret. By Jean 

Middlemas 20 

Lady of Lyons, The. Founded 
on the Iday of that title b.y 

Lord Lytton \ 10 

Lad.y’s Mile, The. By Miss M. 

E.' Braddon 20 

Lady With the Rubies, The. By 

E. Marlitt 20 

Lancaster’s Choice. By ^Irs. 

Alex. McVeigh Miller 20 

Lancelot Ward, M.P. By George 

Temple 10 

Land Leaguers, The. By” An- 
thony Trollope 20 

Last Days at Apswich 10 

Last Days of Pompeii, The. By 
Bulvver L.vUon " ’20 


Last of the Barons, The, By Sir 
E. Bulwer Lytton. 1st half.. 20 
Last of the Barons, The. By Sir 
E. Bulwer Lytton. 2d half.. 20 
Last of the Mohicans, The. By 


J. Fenimore Cooper ’20 

Laurel Vane; or, The Girls’ 
Conspiracy. By Mrs. Alex. 

McVeigh Miller 20 

Lazarus in London. By F. W. 

Robinson 20 

Led Astray; or, “La Petite 
Comtesse.” Octave Feuillet. 10 
Leila: or, The Siege of Grenada. 

By Bulwer Lyffton 10 

Lester’s Secret. By IMary Cecil 

Hay 20 

Lewis* Arundel; or, The Rail- 
road of Life. By Frank E 

Smedley” 20 

Life and Adventures of Martin 
(’huzzlewit. By* Charles Dick- 
ens. First half 20 


265 

10 

20 332 

80 

20 561 

126 

435 

20 

10 733 

35 

10 

219 

20 

20 

469 

20 

20 268 

20 

506 

10 

155 

20 

161 

20 

497 

20 

20 652 

269 

20 

599 

20 

32 

20 

684 

20 40 

20 

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10 130 

20 

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10 267 

10 455 

20 386 

10 164 

20 408 

20 562 

20 

437 

20 

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THE SEASIDE LIBRARY.— Pocket Edition. 


437 Life and Adventures of Martin 
Chuzzlewit. By Charles Dick- 
ens. Second half 

Life’s Atonement, A. By David 

Christie Murray 

617 Like Dian’s Kiss. By “ Rita 
402 Lilliesleaf; or, Passages in the 
Life of Mrs. Margaret Mait- 
land of Sunnyside. B}' Mrs. 

Oliphant 

397 Lionel Lincoln ; or, The Leaguer 
of Boston. By J. Fenimore 

Cooper 

94 Little Dorrit. By Charles Dick- 
ens. First half 

94 Little Dorrit. By Charles Dick- 
ens. Second half 

•279 Little Goldie : A Stor}^ of Wom- 
an’s Love. By Mrs. Sumner 
Hayden 

109 Little Loo. By W. Clark Russell 
179 Little Make-toieve. By B. L. 

Farjeon 

45 Little Pilgrim, A. By Mrs. OJi- 
phant 

272 Little Savage, The. By Captain 

Marryat 

Ill Little School-master Mark, The. 

By J. H. Shorthouse 

92 Lord Lynne’s Choice. By Char- 
lotte M. Braeme; author of 

“Dora Thorne’’ 

749 Lord Vanecourt’s Daughter. By 

Mabel Collins 

67 Lorna Doone. By R. D. Black- 

more. First half 

67 Lorna Doone. By R. D. Black- 

more. Second half 

473 Lost Son, A. By Mary Linskill. 
354 Lottery of Life, The. A Story 
of New York Twenty Years 
Ago. By John Brougham. . . 
453 Lottery Ticket, The. By F. Du 

Boisgobey 

479 Louisa. By Katharine S. Mac- 

quoid 

742 Love and Life. By Charlotte 
M. Yonge 

273 Love and Mirage; or. The Wait- 

ing on an Island. By M. 

Be tham-Ed wards 

232 Love and Money; or, A Peril- 
ous Secret. B 3 ’^ Chas. Reade . 
146 Love Finds the Way, and Other 
Stories^ By Walter Besant 

and James Rice 

313 Lover’s Creed, The. By Mrs. 
Cashel Hoey 

573 Love’s Harvest. B. L. Farjeon 
175 Love’s Random Shot. By Wilkie 

Collins 

757 Love’s Martyr. By Laurence 

Alma Tadema 

291 Love’s Warfare. By Charlotte 
M. Braeme, author of “ Dora 

Thorne ’’ 

118 Loys, Lord Berresford, and Eric 
Dering. By “ The Duchess ’’ 


Lucia, Hugh and Another. By 

Mrs. J. H. Needed 20 

Luck of the Darrells, The. Bj-^ 

James Payn 20 

Lucy Crof ton. By Mrs. Oliphant 10 

Macleod of Dare. By William 

Black 20 

Madame De Presuel. By E. 

Frances Poynter 20 

Madam. By Mrs. Oliphant 20 

Madcap Violet. By Wm. Black 20 
Mad Love, A. By the author of 

“Lover and Lord’’ 10 

Madolin’s Lover. By Charlotte 
M. Braeme, author of “Dora 

Thorne’’ 20 

Madolin Rivers; or, The Little 
Beauty of Red Oak Seminary. 

By Laura Jean Libbe}- 20 

Magdalen Hepburn : A Story of 
the Scottish Reformation. By' 

Mrs. Oliphant 20 

Maiden All Forlorn, A, and Bar- 
bara. By “ The Duchess ”... 10 
Maiden Fair, A. Charles Gibbon 10 
Maid of Athens. By Justin 

McCarthy 20 

Maid of Sker, The. By R D. 

Blackmore. 1st half 20 

Maid of Sker, The. By R. D. 

Blackmore. 2d half 20 

Maid, Wife, or Widow? By 

Mrs. Alexander 10 

Man and Wife. By Wilkie Col- 
lins. First half 20 

Man and Wife. By Wilkie Col- 
lins. Second half 20 

Man of Honor, A. By John 
Strange Winter. Illustrated. 10 
Man She Cared For, The. By 

F. W. Robinson 20 

Margaret Maitland. By Mrs. 

Oliphant 20 

Market Harborough, and Inside 
the Bar. G. J. Whyte-Melville 20 
Marriage of Convenience, A. 

By Harriett Jay 10 

Married in Haste. Edited by 

Miss M. E. Braddon 20 

Mary Anerley. By’^ R. D. Black- 

more 20 

Master Humphrey’s Clock. By' 

Charles Dickens 10 

Master of the Mine, The. By 
Robert Buchanan 20 


Mathias Sandorf. By Jules 

Verne. (Illustrated.) Part I, 10 
Mathias Sandorf. By Jules 

Verne. (Illustrated.) Part II 10 
Mathias Sandorf. By Jules 


Verne. (Illustrated.) Part III 10 
Matt: A Tale of a Caravan. 

By Robert Buchanan 10 

Mauleverer’s Millions. By' T. 

Wemyss Reid 20 

May Blossom ; or. Between Two 
Loves. By Margaret Lee 20 


582 

20 589 

20 370 

20 

44 

20 526 

345 

20 78 

510 

20 

69 

20 

341 

20 

20 

10 

10 449 

633 

10 ^ 

20 

20 

20 "02 

10 688 

30 

30 

30 

30 

480 

10 615 

10 132 

10 «« 

30 

20 578 

10 578 

10 398 

723 

10 

330 

10 

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THE SEASIDE LIBRARY . — Pocket Edition. 


387 Memoirs aud Resolutions of 
Adam Graeme of Mossprray, 
including: some Chronicles of 
the Borough of Fendie. By 

Mrs. Oliphant 

424 Mercedes of Castile; or, Tue 
Voyage to Cathay. By J. Feu- 

imore Cooper 

406 Merchant’s Clerk, The. By Sam- 
uel Warren 

31 Middlemarch. By George Eliot. 

First half 

31 Middlemarch. By George Eliot. 

Second half 

187 Midnight Sun, The. ByFredrika 

Bremer. 

729 Mignon. By Mrs. Forrester... 
492 Mignon ; or. Booties’ Baby. By 

J. S. Winter 

692 Mikado, The, and other Comic 
Operas. Written by W. S. 
Gilbert. Composed by Arthur 

Sullivan 

390 Mildred Trevanion. By “ The 
Duchess ” 

414 Miles Wallingford. (Sequel to 
“ Afloat and Ashore.”) By J. 

Fenimore Cooper 

3 Mill on the Floss, The. By 

George Eliot 

157 Milly’s Hero. By F. W. Robinson 

182 Millionaire, The 

205 Minister’s Wife, The. B}’^ Mrs. 

Oliphant 

399 Miss Brown. By Vernon Lee. . 
369 Miss Bretherton. By Mrs. Hum- 
phry Ward 

245 Miss Tommy. By Miss Mu lock 
315 Mistletoe Bough, The. Edited 

by Miss M. E. Braddon 

618 Mistletoe Bough, The. Christ- 
mas, 1885. Edited by Miss M. 

E. Braddon 

298 Mitchelhurst Place. By Marga- 
ret Veley 

584 Mixed Motives 

2 Molly Bawn. By “ The Duch- 
ess ” 

159 Moment of Madness, A, and 
Other Stories. By Florence 

Marryat 

125 Monarch of Mincing Lane, The. 

By William Black. 

201 Monastery, The. By Sir Walter 

Scott 

119 Monica, and A Rose Distill’d. 

By “The Duchess” 

431 Monikins, The. By J. Fenimore 

Cooper 

26 Monsieur Lecoq. By Emile 

Gaboriau. Vol. I 

26 Monsieur Lecoq. By Emile 

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166 Moonshine and Marguerites. 

By “The Duchess” 

102 Moonstone, The. Wilkie Collins 
178 More Leaves from the Journal 
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By Queen Victoria 


Moths. By“Ouida” 20 

Mount Royal. B3' Miss M. E. 

Braddon 20 

Mr. Butler’s Ward. By F. Mabel 

Robinson 20 

Mrs. Carr’s Companion. By M. 

G. Wightwick 10 

Mrs. Dymond. By Miss Thacke- 
ray 20 

Mrs. Geoffre3\ By “ The Duch- 
ess ” 20 

Mrs. Holl3'er. By Georgiana M. 

Craik 20 

Mrs. Keith’s Crime 10 

3Irs. Lirriper’s Lodgings. By 

Charles Dickens 10 

Mr. Smith : A Part of His Life. 

ByL. B. Walford 20 

Mrs. Smith of Longmains. B.y 
Rhoda Broughton, and Oli- 
ver’s Bride. By Mrs. Oliphant 10 
Mrs. Vereker’s Courier Maid. 

By Mrs. Alexander 10 

Murder or Manslaughter? By 

Helen B. Mathers 10 

My Ducats and My Daughter. 

By the author of “ The Crime 

of Christmas Day” 20 

My Friends and 1. Edited b3' 

Julian Sturgis 10 

My Hero. By Mrs. Forrester. . 20 
My Lady’s Money. By Wilkie 

Collins 10 

M3^ Lord and My Lady. B3’ 

Ml’S. Forrester 20 

3Iy Sister Kate. By Charlotte 
M. Braeme, author of “Dora 
Thorne,” and A Rainy June. 

By “Ouida” 10 

3Iysteries of Paris, The. By Eu- 
gene Sue. Parti.. 20 

Mysteries of Paris, The. By Eu- 
gene Sue. Part II 20 

.Mysterious Hunter, The; or, 
The 3Ian of Death. By Capt. 

L, C. Carleton 20 

3Iystery of Allan Grale, The. By 

Isabella Fy vie 3Ia3'o 20 

3Iystery of Edwin Drood, Tlie. 

By Chas. Dickens 20 

3Iystery of Jessy Page, The. 
and Other Tales. By 31 rs. 

Henry Wood * 10 

3Iysteiy of Orcival, The. By 

Emile Gaboriau 20 

31ystery, The. By 3Irs. Heniw 

Wood 20 

3Iy Ten Years’ Imprisonment. 

B3’ Silvio Pellico 10 

31y Wife's Niece. B3’ the author 
of “ Doctor Edith Romney ”. 20 
My Young Alcides. B3' Char- 
lotte 31. Yonge 20 

Nabob, The: A Story of Paris- 
ian Life and 31anners. By Al- 
phonse Daudet 20 

Nancy. By Rhoda Broughton . 20 


116 

495 

501 

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113 

20 675 

10 25 

20 606 

20 546 

440 

10 

20 256 

10 645 

339 

20 

635 

10 

596 

20 

405 

20 

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20 62;B 

30 724 

20 

433 

10 

10 

20 271 

271 

20 

366 

10 

10 

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20 

454 

10 514 

20 

43 

20 

255 

10 

725 

20 

612 

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666 

20 

10 

20 574 

10 227 

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THE SEASIDE LIBRARY.— PocM Edition. 


5<)9 Nell Haffendeii. By Tighe Hop- 
kins 

181 New Abelard, The. By Robert 

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464 Newconies, The. B 3 ’ William 
Makeoeace Thackeray. Part 

I : 

464 Newcomes, The. Bj' William 

Makepeace Thackera}’. Part 

II 

52 New Magdalen, The. Bj' Wilkie 

Collins ' 

37 Nicliolas Nicklebj’. B 3 ' Charles 

Dickens. First half 

37 Nicholas Nick 4 eb 3 ’. B>' Charles 

Dickens. Second half. 

105 Noble Wife, A. John Saunders 
565 No Medium. By Annie Thomas 
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dress 

GEORGE MUNKO, 


MUNRO’8 PUBLISHING HOUSE* 

17 to 27 A^andewater Street, N. Y. 


P. O. Box 3751. 


NEW TABERNACLE SERMONS 


BY 

PT. Dewitt TALM>GEJ.D. 


Handsomely Bound in Cloth. 12mo. Price $1.00. 


The latest of Dr. Talmage's sermons have not yet been pre- 
sented in book form. They have appeared weekly in The Nsvf 
York Fireside Companion, and are now, 

Pnblished for the First Time in Booh Form, 

THE PRICE OP WHICH IS WITHIN THE REACH OP ALU 

Eacb yolme will Contain Tlirty Semonit 

PRINTED IN 

CLEAR, BOLD, HANDSOME TYPE, 

AND WILL MAKE 

AN ELEGAIIT AND ACCEPTABLE HOLIDAY GIFT, 
The above will be sent postpaid on receipt of price, $1.00. 
Address 

GEOEQE ^UNEO, Fublishar, 


f*, a Sox 8701. 


17 to ^7 Vaudowater Street, New Ymrlli 


JUST ISSUED. 


JUST ISSUED 


JULIET CORSON’S 


NEW FAMILY COOK BOOK. 

BY MISS JUIilET CORSON, 

Author of “Meals for the Million,” etc., etc. 
Superintendent op the New York School op Cookery. 


PRICE : HANDSOMELY BOUND IN CLOTH, $1.00. 

A COMPREHEHSIYE COOK BOOK 

For Family Use in City and Country. 

CONTAINING 

PRACTICAL RECIPES AND FULL AND PLAIN DIREC- 
TIONS FOR COOKING ALL DISHES USED 
IN AMERICAN HOUSEHOLDS. 

The Best and Most Economical Methods of Cookin&r Meats, Fish, 
Vegetables, Sauces, Salads, Piiildings and Pies. 

How to Prepare Relishes and Savory Accessories, Picked-up Bishes, 
Soups, Seasoning, StufGng and Stews. 

How to Make^ Good Bread, Biscuit, Omelets, Jellies, Jams, Pan- 
cakes, Fritters and Fillets. 


Miss Corson is the best American writer on cooking. All of her recipes 
have been carefully tested in the New York School of Cookery. If her direc- 
tions are carefully followed there will be no failures and no reason for com- 
plaint. Her directions are always plain, very complete, and easily followed. 

Juliet Corson’s New Family Cook Book 

Is sold by all newsdealers. It will be sent, postpaid, on receipt of price: 
handsomely bound in cloth, $1.00. Address 

GEORGE MUNRO, 

Munko’s Publishing House, 

p. O. Box 3751. 17 to 27 Vandewater St.. N. Y. 


THE NEW YORE FASHION BAZAR 


BOOK OF THE TOILET, 

PRICE 25 CEIVTSI. 

THIS IS A LITTLE BOOK 

WHICH 

WE CAN RECOMMEND TO EVERY LADY 

FOR THR 

PBBSESVATION AND INCREASE OF HEALTE AND BEAUT1 

IT CONTAINS FULL DIRECTIONS FOR ALL THE 

ARTS AND MYSTERIES OF PERSONAL DECORATION, 

AND FOR 

Increasing tbe Natural Graces of Form and Expression. 

ALL THE LITTLE AFFECTIONS OF THE 

STsin, Hair, E3res ancL 

THAT DETRACT FROM APPEARANCE AND HAPPINESS 

Are HEade the Subjects of Precise and Excellent Pecipes. 

ladies Are Instructed How to Reduce Their Weight 

Without Injury to Health and Without Producing 
Pallor and Weakness, 

HOTHINQ NECESSARY TO 

A COMPLETE TOILET BOOK OF RECIPES 

AND 

VALUABLE ADVICE AND INFOEMATIOK 
HAS BEEN OVERLOOKED IN THE COMPILATION OF THIS VOLUME 


For sale by all Newsdealers, or sent to any address on receipt of 26 center 
postage prepaid, by the publisher. Address 

GEORGE MUNRO. Munro's FubUshlug Houie, 

O. Sox STOt. iT to W Taodewater Street N. 


** Ouida’s ” Latest Novel Now Ready in 
Large, Bold, Handsome Type. 


OTHMAR. 

By“OUIDA.” 

Seaside Library, Pocket Edition, No, 639. 

PRICE 20 CENTS* 


"" sale by all newsdealers, or sent to any address, postage prepaid^ 
on receipt of price, 20 cents. Address 

GEORGE MUNEO, Munro’s Publishing House, 

P.O.Box 8751. 17 to 27' Vande water Street, N. Y, 


»0W EBADY-BeaiitifaUy Bound in Oloth-PEIOE 60 CENTS. 


A NEW PEOPLE’S EDITION 

OP THAT MOST DELIGHTFUL OF - CHILDREN’S STORIES, 

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 

By LEWIS CARROLL, 

Author of Through the Lookiiig-Glass,** etc. 

/Tith Forty-two Beautiful Illustrations by John Tenniel. 

The most delicious and taking nonsense for children ever written. A 
.)ook to be read by all mothers to their little ones. It makes them dance 
with delight. Everybody enjoys the fun of this charming writer fo** the 
nursery. 

I’HIS NEW PEOPLE’S EDITION, BOUND IN CLOTH, PRICE 50 CENTS, 
IS PRINTED IN LARGE, HANDSOME, READABLE TYPii. 
WITH ALL THE ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS 
OF THE EXPENSIVE ENGLISH EDITION. 


^ent by Nlail on Receipt of* Cent^* 


Address GEORGE MUNRO, Munro’s Publishing House, 
O* Box 3751* 17. eo 27 Vamde water Street, New 


MUNHO^S PUBLIC A TTOT^S. 


Philosophy of Whist. 

AN ESSAY ON THE SCIENTIFIC AND INTELLECTUAL 
ASPECTS OF THE MODERN GAME. 

IN TWO PARTS. 

Fart I.— THE PHILOSOPHY OF WHIST PLAY. 

Part II.-THE PHILOSOPHY OF WHIST PROBABILITIES. 

By WILLIAM POLE, 

Mus. Doc. OxoN. 

Fellow op the Royal Societies op London anj Edinburgh; 

One op the Examiners in the University of London; 

Knight op the Japanese Imperial Order op the Rising Sun. 

Complete in Seaside Library (Pocket Edition), No. 669. 

PRINTED IN LARGE, BOLD, HANDSOME TYPE. 

PltlCI*! 20 CENJTS. 

For sale by all newsdealers, or sent to any address, postage prepaid, on 
receipt of the price, 20 cents. Address 

GEORGE MUNRO, Munro’s Publishing House, 

P. O. Box 3751. 17 to 27 Vandewater Street, New York. 



Munros Dialogues and Speakers. 

PRICE 10 CENTS EACH. 


These books embrace a series of Dialogues and Speeches, all new and 
original, and are just what is needed to give spice and merriment to Social 
Parties, Home Entertainments, Debating Societies, School Recitations, Ama- 
teur Theatricals, etc. They contain Irish, German, Negro, Yankee, and, in 
fact, all kinds of Dialogues and Speeches. The following are the titles of the 
books : 

No. 1. The Funny Fellow’s DinloRiies. 

No. 2. The Clemence and Donkey Dinloanes. 

No. 3. Mrs. Siiiith’s Boarders’ Jlinlogiies. 

No. 4. Schoolboys’ Comic Dinloiriies. 


No. 1. Vot I Know ’Bout Gruel Societies Speaker. 

No. 2. The John B. Go-olT Comic Speaker. 

No. 3. My Boy Vilhelm’s Speaker. 

The above titles express, in a slight degree, the contents of the books, 
which are conceded to be the best series of mirth-provoking Speeches and 
Dialogues extant. Price 10 cents edch. Address 

GEORGE MUNRO, Munro’s Publishing House, 

P. O. Box 3751. 17 to 27 Vandewater Street, New York, 


MtlNRO’S PUBLICATIONS. 

Old Sleuth Library 


A Series of the Most Tlirilling Detective Stories 
Ever Published! 


Jia PRICE 

1 Old Sleuth the Detective 10c 

2 The King of the Detectives 10c 

3 Old Sleuth’s Triumph. Mrsi half. 10c 

3 Old Sleuth’s Triumph. Second half. 10c 

4 Under a Million Disguises 10c 

6 Night Scenes in New York 10c 

6 Old Electricity, the Lightning Detective 10c 

7 The Shadow Detective. Mrst half 10c 

7 The Shadow Detective. Second half... 10c 

8 Red-Light Will, the River Detective 10c 

9 Iron Burgess, the Government Detective 10c 

10 The Brigands of New York 10c 

11 Tracked by a Ventriloquist 10c 

12 The Twin Detectives 10c 

13 The French Detective 10c 

14 Billy Wayne, the St. Louis Detective 10c 

15 The New York Detective 10c 

16 O’Neil McDarragh, the Irish Detective 10c 

17 Old Sleuth in Harness Again 10c 

18 The Lady Detective 10c 

19 The Yankee Detective 10c 

20 The Fastest Boy in New York iOc 

21 Black Raven, the Georgia Detective 10c 

22 Night-Hawk, the Mounted Detective 10c 

23 The Gypsy Detective 10c 

24 The Mysteries and Miseries of New York 10c 

25 Old Terrible 10c 

26 The Smugglers of New York Bay 10c 

27 Manfred, the Magic Trick Detective 10c 

28 Mura, the Western Lady Detective 10c 

29 Moasieur Armand; or, The French Detective in New 

York 10c 

30 Lady Kate, the Dashing Girl Detective. First half . ... 10c 

80 Lady Kate, the Dashing Girl Detective. Second half... 10c 

81 Hamud, the Detective... 10c 


The Publisher will send any of the above works by mail, 
postage prepaid, on receipt of the price, 10 cents each. Address 

GEORGE MUNEO. 

Munro’s Publishing House, 
f. O. Box 87M. 17 to 27 Vandewater St. and 45 to 63 Rose St., New York 


THE SEASIDE LIBRARY. — Ordinary EdiMon. 


58 The Monarch of Mincing Lane 10 

79 Madcap Violet (small type) 10 

604 Madcap Violet (large type) 26 

242 The Three Feathers 10 

390 The Marriage of Moira Fergus, and The Maid of Killeena. 10 

417 Macleod of Dare 20 

451 Lady Silverdale's Sweetheart 10 

568 Green Pastures and Piccadilly 10 

816 White Wings: A Yachting Romance 10 

826 Oliver Goldsmith 10 

950 Sifirise: A Story of These Times 20 

1025 The Pupil of Aurelius. . . 10 

1032 That Beautiful Wretch 10 

1161 The Four MacNicols 10 

1264 Mr. Pisistratus Brown, M.P., in the Highlands 10 

1429 An Adventure in Thule. A Story for Young People 10 

1556 Shandon Bells 20 

1683 Yolande 20 

1893 Judith Shakespeare: Her Love Affairs and other Advent- 
ures 30 

MISS M. E. BRA.DDON S WORKS. 

36 Aurora Floyd 20 

69 To the Bitter End 20 

89 The Lovels of Arden 20 

95 Dead Men’s Shoes. 20 

109 Eleanor’s Victory 30 

114 Darrell Markham 10 

140 The Lady Lisle 10 

171 Hostages to Fortune 20 

190 Henry Dunbar 20 

215 Birds of Prey 20 

235 An Open Verdict - 20 

251 Lady Audley’s Secret 20 

254 The Octoroon 10 

260 Charlotte’s Inheritance 30 

287 Leighton Grange 10 

295 Lost for Love 20 

322 Dead Sea Fruit 20 

459 The Doctor’s Wife 20 

469 Rupert Godwin "... 20 


THE SEASIDE LIBRARY.-- Ordinary Edition. 


481 Vixen 30 

483 The Cloven Foot 30 

500 Joshua Haggard’s Daughter 20 

519 Weavers and Weft 10 

535 Sir Jasper’s Tenant 20 

639 A Strange World 30 

550 Fenton’s Quest 2(1 

562 John Marchmont’s Legacy 30 

573 The Lady’s Mile 20 

579 Strangers and Pilgrims 30 

581 Only a Woman (Edited by Miss M. E. Braddon) 20 

619 Taken at the Flood 30 

641 Only a Clod 20 

849 Publicans and Sinners 30 

656 George Caulfield’s Journey 10 

665 The Shadow in the Corner 10 

666 Bound to John Company; or, Robert Ainsleigh 30 

701 Barbara ; or, Splendid Misery 30 

705 Put to the Test (Edited by Miss M. E. Braddon) 36 

734 Diavola; or, Nobody’s Daughter. Part I - 36 

734 Diavola; or. Nobody’s Daughter, Part II 36 

811 Dudley Carleon 16 

' 828 The Fatal Marriage 10 

^T^837 Just as I Am; or, A Living Lie •: 3(] 

1154 The Mistletoe Bough 20 

1365 Mount Royal 20 

1469 Flower and Weed 10 

1553 The Golden Calf 20 

1638 A Hasty Marriage (Edited by Miss M. E. Braddon) 26 

1715 Phantom Fortune 36 

1736 Under the Red Flag 16 

1877 An Ishmaelite 36 

1915 The Mistletoe Bough. Christmas, 1884 (Edited by Miss 

M. E. Braddon) 26» 

CHARLOTTE, EMILY. AND ANNE BRONTE’S WORKS, 

3 Jane Eyre (in small type) * 10 

396 Jane EjTC (in bold, handsome type) 20 

163 Shirley 26 

611 The Professor, 


THE Bii\th of Civilizatjon — A MessAce. fwm the S E A ^ 



‘HEAUHANOPURnYOFTHEPEOPIJE.:’z/i»/fi. 

Specialty drawn byH SJ^ARKS^RAArthe Proprietoreof PEARi SOAP. 


PEARS’ SOAP IMPROVES THE COM- 
PLEXION, IS UNRIVALED AS A PURE DE- 
LIGHTFUL TOILET^SOA^ A ND IS FOR SALE 
THROUGHOUT THE CIVILIZED WORLD. 


The New York Fashion Bazar. 

THE BEST AUEEICAN HOME MAGAZINE. 

Price 125 Cents per Copy. Subscription Price $3.00 per Year* 


Among its regular contributors are Mary Cecil Hay, “The Duchess,” 
author of “ Molly Bawn,” Lucy Randall Comfort, Charlotte M. Braemk, 
author of “Dora Thorne,” Mrs. Alex. McVeigh Miller, Mary E. Bryan, 
author of “ Manch,” and Florence A. Warden, author of “ The House on the 
Marsh.” 


COMMENTS O 

The New York Fashion Bazar aims 
to give full information of what ladies 
and children should wear, and, from 
the space devoted to the matter, both 
pictorially and descriptively, we would 
suppose it succeeds. There is also a 
considerable amount of miscellaneous 
reading matter, especially of fiction. 
(Publi^ed by George Munro, New 
York City. $3.00 a yesiT.)— United 
Presbyterian. 

The New York Fashion Bazar for 
this month, George Munro, publisher, 
is on our table, and an interesting 
number it is to the women of the land 
who have their spring costumes to 
make up. This magazine is standard 
and the best authority on matters of 
fashion.- -Baptist Reflector. 

The current number of The New 
York Fashion Bazar, published by 
George Munro, New York, is an illus- 
trated library, as it were, of fashions 
in every branch of human wear. The 
figures, forms, and fittings are almost 
bewildering even to those who possess 
a quick eye to the subject that is so 
widely fascinating. The colored first 
page of the cover is too attractive to 
sucn people to be resisted. The Fash- 
ion Colored Supplement forms the 
frontispiece to the present number.— 
New England Journal of Agriculture. 

We have received the last number of 
The New York Fashion Bazar, pub- 
lished by George Munro, New York 
City, the yearly subscription of which 
is only $3. Each number has a large 
colored fashion supplement, contain- 
ing New York and Paris fashions, and 
the book is full of illustrations of every 
conceivable article of ladies’ attire and 
descriptions how to make the same, 
besides serial stories and sketches and 
much miscellaneous matter.— ilfame 
Farmer. 

The New York Fashion Bazar is f 
per copy. Subscription price $3.00 pei 


S’ THE PRESS; 

We have received the last number of 
The New York Fashion Bazar, and at 
a hasty glance we see it is an interest- 
ing magazine. Its fashions are useful 
to those ladies who do their own dress- 
making, or even decide how they shall 
be made, and its stories are fascinat- 
ing. What more can we say? Address 
George Munro, 17 Vandewater Street, 
N. Y .—Worcester [Mass.] Chronicle. 

The New York Fashion Bazar, pub- 
lished bv George Munro, is full of fash- 
ions and reading. It seems to be very 
full, and to be well adapted to the end 
sought. The yearly subscription is 
$3.W, or 25 cents a number. It is very 
large, containing seventy-four pages, 
large size. — Wilmington Morning 
Star. 

The New York Fashion Bazar con- 
tains an attractive variety of literary 
entertainments, stories, poems, sketch- 
es. etc., in addition to the display of 
ladies’ fashions which are its chief 
study. These are set forth with an 
array of pictures and descriptions 
which should leave nothing to doubt 
regarding the newest styles. The se- 
lection of embroidery patterns offers a 
tempting choice for artistic tastes. 
New Y"ork: George Munro. — i/o me. 
Journal. 

The New York Fashion Bazar, with 
supplement, is one of the most inter- 
esting and ornamental periodicals that 
have reached the Herald office. It is 
issued by the publisher of the Fireside 
Companion and Seaside Library . — 
Chicago Herald. 

The New York Fashion Bazar, pub- 
lished by George Munr».for this month, 
is a marvel of beauty and excellence. 
It is full of entertaining reading, and 
of the newest and most fashionable 
patterns and designs. It must be seen 
to be appreciated.— C/utrcA Press. 
r sale by all newsdealers, price 25 cents 
year. Address 


GEORGE MUNRO, Muiiro’s Publishing House, 

P. O. Box 3751. 17 to 27 Vandewater Street, N. Y. 


THE CELEBRATED 

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The SOHMER 
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leading musicians 
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ARE AT PRESENT THE MOST POPULAR 

AND PREFERRED BY THE LEADING ARTISTS. 

SOHMER & CO., Manufacturers, No. 149 to 155 E. 14th Street, N. Y. 


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ALL AGENTS SELL TICKETS VIA THE NORTH-WESTERN. 


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R.S. Hair , General Passenerer Agent, CHICAGO, ILL. 




I 


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library of congress 



00014806425 


